Sara Imari Walker

Yeah, I wonder.

They have like a thing that they just like filter them every day to make sure there's no dead ones hanging out.

Yeah, they're amazing.

We would be.

Yeah, but I mean, there's a certain level of excitement seeing it here.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think how diverse life on Earth is is rather shocking.

I guess probably we're decent.

We're, like, you know, used to it, as you're saying, so we don't find it as shocking as we should.

I, you know, I don't know, will be my honest scientific professional answer.

I think.

Yeah, no, of course, how could you?

But I think it's really important to be like honest about the fact that we don't know and just like put it out there because it's very tempting to speculate.

But I think, you know, the more I think about how large the universe really is, and I don't even mean physically large, like, you know, like you can look at the Hubble Deep Field and you can see, you know, 10,000 galaxies of like the size of your like

pen tip on the night sky and you're like oh my god the universe is a huge place but if you you know like if you go into a chemistry lab and you ask a cheminformatician how many molecules there are they can't even estimate how many molecules there are like chemical space is so big it's it's really crazy like there's uh one molecule i usually use an example it's called taxol which is an anti-cancer drug and if you wanted to make every permutation of that molecular structure and every like sort of three-dimensional shape you could with those atoms it would fill 1.5 you

universes in volume, 1.5 universes, one molecular formula.

This is how big chemistry is.

And then if you want to get to technological artifacts or biological forms, like the space that we live in is so exponentially large, it's unimaginable.

And to think that other life out there would traverse the same path through the space of

things that could exist that we have is to me like a major sort of a major leap I'm not ready to take because I just I think the universe is far larger in the kind of living things that could exist than we can even imagine.