Michael Levin

Boy, I have no expertise in that whatsoever.

I have met the ones we've made.

I absolutely think so because, because look, all of life, all of all standard model systems are an N of one course of evolution on earth.

Right.

And trying to make conclusions about biology from looking at life on earth is like testing your theory on the same data that generated it.

It's all, it's all kind of like locked in.

So we absolutely have to create novel models,

examples that have no history on Earth.

Xenobots have no history of selection to be a good xenobot.

The cells have selection for various things, but the xenobot itself never existed before.

And so we can make chimeras, we make frog-a-lottles that are sort of half frog, half axolotl.

You can make all sorts of hybrids, right?

Constructions of living tissue with robots and whatever.

We need to be making these things until we find actual aliens, because otherwise we're just looking at an N of one set of examples, all kinds of frozen accidents of evolution and so on.

We need to go beyond that to really understand biology.

Yeah, I think it's very hard to create something that's very different, right?

We are just locked in both experimentally and in terms of our imagination, right?

It's very hard.

Yeah.

Yeah.