Sara Imari Walker

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day

Yeah.

Assembly theory is born out of an interest in solving the origin of life and finding aliens.

So that's sort of the motivation.

I think it's really important to be clear about that to start because it introduces some kind of radical reconceptions of the way we think about fundamental physics, at least I think so.

But the key idea of the theory is that the universe cannot generate complexity outside of living processes.

And so we have a way of formalizing what seems kind of intuitively obvious that the universe doesn't generate complex objects for free.

And we do this with this idea of assembly theory of thinking about the assembly space, which is like the space of all constructible objects.

And you can talk about the complexity in that space as a minimal number of steps for making an object.

And if you see objects that require a lot of steps to make them and they're in high abundance, life is the only thing that can make them.

This includes everything, technology, everything on your table, you know, requires billions of years of evolution, evolution of intelligence and technology to generate.

So.

Is that the one that's like hot inside?

Yes, I have seen that.

It's gorgeous.

Yes.

So I'm actually really interested in understanding to what degree we can consider minerals on our planet alive or artifacts of life.

But we haven't formalized the theory entirely for minerals yet.

So I think that one of the sort of key results we have so far is actually quantifying in molecules a complexity boundary above which a molecule is so complex that we can say it's definitively of life and we've experimentally verified that.

measuring this property of assembly of molecules to say these are derived from life these are um you know and that there's a clear boundary uh for minerals we haven't done that yet because we're still formalizing the theory and the kind of measurements we need to take but i expect there to be a boundary that planets can make some kinds of crystal complexity but not all of it that we see on this planet so what is what's the conventional definition of life