Sara Imari Walker

in the universe is maximizing the amount of stuff that gets to exist, for example.

There's this whole world of complex objects that cannot exist unless there's a living architecture that can select and constrain the space to make something like this instead of the universes of other things those atoms could be arranged in.

So if you think that there's something that deep and that fundamental about the nature of life, the origin of life transition has something to do with the emergence of systems that basically can persist.

They can survive against this sort of random chemical noise, like the chemical soup is just a mess of things being created and destroyed, created and destroyed.

And you get something that basically can reinforce its own existence enough to keep existing and then building more complex stuff.

And that's really the origin of life transition.

It's pretty simple to say like that.

But trying to build an experiment and understand the sort of chemical architecture that mediates that transition is quite hard.

And that's where we're at right now.

So that's my collaborator, Lee Cronin, is a chemist.

And he's totally brilliant.

And actually, him and I are probably, you know, I don't know, like what we're trying to do is a little bit crazy.

Yeah.

To solve the origin of life.

But, you know, like I hadn't like he he's doing the experimental stuff.

But like the sort of idea we had in mind is like, all right, a book, try to get the ideas out there, get people excited about thinking about this space.

And he'll start a company that will digitize chemistry and try to raise the funds to actually do the experiments.

So he's trying to build the technology and experiments.

It's built on this platform he has for.

building robots that basically do the chemistry for you.