Sara Imari Walker

Yeah.

So there's a lot of debate about what definitions of life should hold.

But the one that is usually cited by astrobiologists is life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.

And I've memorized it because I find it so annoying.

So I'm like, I got it down.

I got to know what I'm annoyed with.

Everything.

It was very funny writing the book because I wanted to get into the new ideas.

And my editor was like, you got to explain how people think about life now.

And I was like, OK, well, this definition is the most annoying one.

I'll just pick it apart.

And it's actually like all the words in it are annoying in some sense.

So the first one is that life is chemical.

I've never really thought about chemistry being the defining feature of life.

I think you have to

separate out that life emerges, at least as we understand it, from a chemical soup on a planet, right?

So it emerges in chemistry, but it doesn't mean it's a chemical phenomena.

And the sort of analogy from the physicist's conception of nature I could draw there is we don't think that gravity is a phenomena of rocks.

Gravity represents some universal physics in our universe.

And so when we're thinking about, you know, planets and things, we don't think that they obey the laws of gravity because they're made of rocks.