Sara Imari Walker

It's totally crazy.

That's why I like this problem because nobody knows what happened.

There's a lot of speculation.

The sort of canonical ones that you'll hear about are usually like the RNA world that life started with an RNA molecule, which like RNA is still in our bodies today.

So like DNA, most people are probably familiar with, gets translated, like transcribed into RNA.

And then the RNA is what's used to make proteins.

So RNA, you know, kind of does a dual role.

So people think, oh, maybe it happened early on and it was the first life.

And then there's like other hypotheses like hydrothermal vents and, you know, sort of energy first approaches to origins of life that like we had some metabolism that was organizing there.

But all of these are really speculative, and I think the issue is that we're trying to take molecules that are in modern living systems and trying to understand how they can emerge in a prebiotic environment on early Earth and not really thinking about how the Earth –

And the geochemistry on the Earth had to evolve into a living system.

So it had like selection had to happen.

Evolution had to happen before life.

And this is sort of the critical gap that we're really missing is like what is that mechanism?

And that's where assembly theory is supposed to be coming in is trying to give us a mechanism for how chemical systems can evolve before we even have a living cell, for example.

And like in trying to iterate what those missing stages are because we just don't know what they look like right now.

I think, well, so that's a great question.

But one of the problems with this area is like we don't know what questions to ask.

So I actually don't know that that's the right question.

I think when you think about it much more deeply about like the physics of life and the way that we've been describing it already, if you think physics, like what life is doing as a mechanism.