Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I've seen you say that.
Because we have this combinatorial scaffolding going all the way back from Luca. So you've got cells that can self-replicate. And then you go all the way to terraforming the Earth. You've got all these architectures, the amount of selection that's going on, biological selection, just to be clear, biological evolution. And then you have multicellularity. then animals and abstraction.
With abstraction, there was another kick because you can then build architectures and computers and cultures and language. These things are the biggest things that exist in the universe because we can just build architectures that couldn't naturally arise anywhere. The further that distance goes in time, it's gigantic. And from a complexity perspective. Yeah.
I agree. And I would say, I'll say again, that Earth is the most gigantic thing we know in the universe, commentatorily. We know. We know. Now, I guess, this is just purely a guess, I have no data other than hope. Well, maybe not hope. Maybe, no, I have some data. That every star in the sky probably has planets and life is probably emerging on these planets.
But the amount of contingency that is associated with life is I think the commentorial space associated to these planets is so different. Our causal cones are never going to overlap or not easily. And this is the thing that makes me sad about alien life. That's why we have to create alien life in the lab as quickly as possible.
Because I don't know if we are going to be able to build architectures that will intersect with alien intelligence and architectures.
Time and the ability to communicate.
Yeah. My biggest fear in a way is that life is everywhere, but we become infinitely more lonely because of our scaffolding in that combinatorial space.
Exactly.
i i truly don't know but i it's an excuse for me to ask for people to give me money to make a planet simulator yeah right if i can make with a different i'm just like another shameless say it's like give me money i need this was all a long plug for a planet simulator it's like you know hey i'll be the first in line to my my my uh my rick my rick garage has run out of room you know yeah no um
Yeah.
Exactly. If we could basically recreate the selection before biology, as we know it, that gives rise to a different biology, we should be able to put the constraints on where I look in the universe. So here's the thing. Here's my dream. My dream is that by creating life in the lab, based upon constraints we understand, so let's go for Venus-type life or Earth-type life or something.
Again, do Earth 2.0. Screw it. Let's do Earth 2.0. And Earth 2.0 has a different genetic... Alphabet, fine, that's fine. Different protein alphabet, fine. Have cells and evolution, all that stuff. We will then be able to say, okay, life is a more general phenomena. Selection is more general than what we think is the chemical constraints on life.
And we can point the James Webb and other telescopes at other planets. that we are in that zone, we are most likely to combinatorially overlap with, right? So, because, you know, we basically, so there are chemistry.
And then we can then basically shine light on them literally and look at light coming back and apply advanced assembly theory to general theory of language that we will get and say, huh, we, in that signal, it looks random, but there's a copy number. Oh,
This random set of things that shouldn't be, that looks like a true random number generator has structure as a, not Kolmogorov, AIT type structure, but evolutionary structure given by assembly theory. And we start to, but I would say that because I'm a shameless assembly theorist.
I hope that as we build abstractions... I mean, one idea is that as we go to intelligence, intelligence allows us to look at the regularities around us in the universe. And that gives us some common grounding to discuss with aliens.
And you might be right that we will overlap there, even though we have completely different chemistry, literally completely different chemistry, that we will be able to pass information from one another. But it's not a given. And, you know, I have to kind of try and divorce hope and emotion, you know, away from what I can logically justify.
But the universe is expanding. But the nice thing is, I would say, I would look... You see, I think Carl Sagan did the wrong thing. Well, not the wrong thing. He flicked the Voyager probe around in a pale blue dot and said, look how big the universe is. I would have done it the other way around and said, look at the Voyager probe that came from the planet Earth that came from Luca.
Look at how big Earth is.
Showing 321–340 of 545 · page 17 of 28
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