Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens
29 Dec 2022
Betül Kaçar is an astrobiologist at University of Wisconsin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - House of Macadamias: https://houseofmacadamias.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% off your first order - Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 off - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free - GiveDirectly: https://givedirectly.org/lex to get gift matched up to $1000 - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex to get 25% off premium EPISODE LINKS: Betül's Twitter: https://twitter.com/betulland Betül's Instagram: https://instagram.com/betul.kacar.astro/ Kacar Lab: https://kacarlab.org/ Betül's TED Talk: https://go.ted.com/betulkacar PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:20) - History of life on Earth (16:25) - Origin of life (39:11) - Genetic language of life (52:08) - Life and energy (1:02:50) - Ancient DNA (1:21:48) - Evolution (1:33:19) - Alien life (2:01:19) - Panspermia (2:07:41) - Restarting life on Earth (2:20:23) - Where ideas come from (2:27:54) - Science and language (2:36:31) - Love (2:37:55) - Advice to young people (2:42:29) - Meaning of life
Chapter 1: What is the conversation about with Betül Kaçar?
The following is a conversation with Batul Kachar, an astrobiologist at University of Wisconsin, studying the essential biological attributes of life. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got House of Macadamias for a satiating and delicious snack. Mizzer Domain for style. Eight Sleep for naps.
ExpressVPN for privacy and security. GiveDirectly for philanthropy. And Blinkist for nonfiction.
Chapter 2: How do sponsors support the podcast?
Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad rates. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
This show is brought to you by House of Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high-quality and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door, which they did just today, another shipment. I got in my hand an unopened box dipped macadamias chocolate flavor. This is the one I went through first last time. And it was delicious. It is an incredible source of happiness for me.
I knew for a long time that macadamia nuts were really healthy. Because I remember when I was first exploring, okay, so on keto, what is the way to get fats into the diet? Because it has to be a high-fat diet. And I was looking at nuts and I was thinking of, okay, which nuts are the healthiest? And I remember macadamia is always coming up to the top of the list.
I'm going to try not to eat all of them so that I have some for guests when they come over because it's like a perfect guest snack. It's healthy. It's delicious. It's just pure perfection. They also sent me some macadamia bars, which were also delicious last time. I'd probably prefer the whole nuts. I'm nuts for nuts. Anyway, go to houseofmacadamias.com to get 20% off your first order.
This show is also brought to you by Mizzen and Main, the maker of comfortable, stylish dress shirts and other menswear. I wear their black dress shirt and I love it. I have a ton of them. Sometimes when I do these ad reads, I struggle to try to convey exactly why I like this particular piece of clothing.
which is where I wished there was like a brain-computer interface way to directly communicate the actual experience of wearing the clothing. And if you get a large number of people with that data, you get a sense of, okay, well, 96% of people feel good in this. That's a good chance that I will also feel good. That's fascinating.
Of course, you could get that through self-report surveys, but it would be nice to get direct data because you can't lie, but the feelings don't lie. But then again, there could be other kinds of variables, like what else is going on in your life?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of macadamia nuts in the discussion?
You might be just in a bad mood about something else or watch a really sad movie while wearing the shirt. So I don't know. It's an imperfect system that we're going to have to work out. Right now, you'll get $35 off any regular price order when you go to mizuname.com and use promo code LEX. This episode is also brought to you by Eat Sleep and its new pod three mattress.
They've been a sponsor for ever. And they've been my bed mattress cooling system when I sleep forever. And it's a source of a lot of happiness. I recently tweeted about the number of hours there are in a regular lifetime. You know, if you live 70 to 80 years old, there's about 600 to 700,000 hours in a life. And I think a large percent of those hours is spent sleeping.
Of course, you can think of sleeping as a important process for health to regenerate your energy and all that kind of stuff. But it is also in itself important a source of happiness. And I think you want to use the best bed for the job. There's just not a better feeling of a cool surface with a warm blanket. And a day full of battles won and you return to rest and reminisce about the battles.
So you can again the next day return to the battles that are in store for you. Check it out and get special savings when you go to asleep.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've used them for many years. They've had the big sexy button that just works when you press it.
And I use it, you know, it's the first layer of protection of your data, of your privacy on the internet. ISPs and basically a lot of different services and tools collect your data. And a good VPN should be your first layer of protection in those situations, in most situations. You know, you could also change your location in the world.
Now, this is useful for different services like Netflix and so on. But mostly, I just like it from a software engineering design perspective. I love tools that just work. They do one thing and they do it really well. And they do it across different platforms. They never break down. Everything just works. Everything's intuitive from the UI perspective.
And from the back end perspective, everything just works smoothly. Android, Linux, everything. I love it. Go to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free. This show is also brought to you by GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that lets you send cash directly to people in need.
It's perhaps a counterintuitive notion, but the giving of money to alleviate some of the suffering in the world or to improve the quality of life for a bunch of people in the world is not an easy problem.
I mean, there's so many challenges and there's just a lot of studies behind the principles that GiveDirectly operates under, which is if you actually give money to the people most in need, they're going to themselves spend that money to maximally improve their life. This too is a counterintuitive notion, but it works time and time again.
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Chapter 4: What insights are shared about the evolution of life?
So we look at Indo-European languages and try to understand certain words and make trees to understand. This is what Slavic word is for snow, something like snig.
Now we jumped to languages that humans spoke, human history.
Exactly. So we make trees to understand what is the original ancestor? What did they use to say snow? And if you have a lot of cultures who use the word snow, you can imagine that it was snowy. That's why they needed that word. It's the same thing for biology, right? If we understand some function about that enzyme, we can understand the environment that they lived in. It's similar in that sense.
So now you're looking at the alphabet of life. In this case, it's not 20 or 25 letters. You have four letters. So what is really interesting that stands out to me when I look at this, on the outer shell, you're looking at the 20 amino acids that compose life, right? The one, the methionine that you see, that's the start. So the start is always the same.
To me, that is fascinating that all life starts with the same start. There's no other start code. So you sent the AUG to the cell that when that information arrives, the translation knows, all right, I got to start. Function is coming. Following this is a chain of information until the stop starts. which are highlighted in black squares.
So for people just listening, we're looking at a standard RNA color table organized in a wheel. There's an outer shell and there's an inner shell all used in the four letters that we're talking about. And with that, we can compose all of the amino acids and there's a start and there's a stop. And presumably you put together the,
And with these letters, you walk around the wheel to put together the words, the sentences.
Yeah, the words, the sentences. And again, you get one start. There are three different ways to stop this, one way to start it. And for each... letter, you have multiple options. So you say you have a code A, the second code can be another A. And even if you mess that up, you still can't rescue yourself.
So you can get, for instance, I'm looking at the lysine K, you get an A and you get an A and then you get an A that gives you the lysine.
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Chapter 5: What insights are shared about the nature of evolution?
That's exactly what we thought, and it was not the case for all the broken translation missionaries. For instance, if the variant was coming from a near ancestor, that didn't happen. It was almost cruising around, trying different modules and sort of living its best life still, because there is no real urgency in the system to fix the most important problem.
And there's also not a direction. Maybe to you it's obvious that's the problem, but to the cell, maybe you're the problem. I'm living, like you said, my best life. I mean, I guess that's the thing about evolution is we don't know what the right direction to- Yeah, it's almost like you can imagine that you have this messy closet and- Go on. Yeah.
happens to be an accurate representation of my life.
So you take a look at it and you see all the sweaters or, you know, jeans are all over the place. And then you look at a drawer that has socks coming out of it. And you think that's the most important one. I'm just going to fix that one. And then you fix that one. And then you think you will get to the other one, but you don't because you just fix the most important one.
That is the, whatever that was getting into your way. That's really what evolution is. It's quite lazy. It fixes the problem that seems to be the most immediate, and it doesn't go beyond what it really needs to. It seems like at least for our experimental setup, that was the case.
Especially for rapidly evolving systems. So is the environment they're operating in pretty constrained? Is there urgency?
I would say that we definitely constrain the environment. It's definitely removed from their natural setup. We are not evolving them in a gut. It's a very homogeneous system, very controlled temperature, controlled food, controlled carbon.
So just looking at that, let me ask the romantic question. How did evolution create so much beautiful, complex variety on Earth? Like from that, you're saying that we're talking about improving different modules, but if we step back and look at the entirety of the tree, of the different organisms that created all throughout history,
The stuff that's fun to you with the first few billion and the stuff that's fun to me when I watch on YouTube, which is like the lion versus gorilla fights and so on. But the whole thing is fun. So with all that beautiful variety from the predator and the prey, from the self-replicating bacteria and all that kind of stuff. How did it do it?
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Chapter 6: How do environmental factors influence the evolution of life?
And then you move forward, you see the emergence of eukaryotes, endosymbiosis, also another singular event. And then you move forward and then comes the plants. So these are, I counted, I think, six different things that seems to have happened just once.
The singularity events in the history of evolution of life on Earth.
So what's really fascinating here is that there seems to be two different courses, the time course. Evolution is operating at the molecular level, right? We're talking about seconds. We're talking about mutations that happen every second. We're talking about selection that's also happening under a minute, right? So that is a very fast process.
The fact that I can evolve bacteria in a lab and I say almost complainingly, oh my goodness, it took me 150 days, right? I mean, that's pretty rapid for change to be seen. But then the big changes and the ones that I'm talking, the really big innovations that caused an increase of oxygen on this planet, or even its own mere presence, are due to these molecular innovations.
Seems to only happen a handful of times over billions of years of timescale.
Let me ask you this question, having to do with my half-asleep tweet. So saying that we all originated from one common ancestor... That's just one of the miraculous things about life on Earth.
Of course, you could say there's multiple common ancestors in the beginning, multiple organisms and so on, but the other stuff that you're talking about is these singular events, these leaps of invention throughout evolutionary history. Now, there's a bunch of people who were commenting, a bit surprising to me, who were basically skeptical of this idea.
Well, I would say evolution, honestly, the process of evolution. But when you just actually focus in on like, holy crap, eukaryotes were invented. Holy crap, photosynthesis were invented. Those are incredible inventions. And also, we can even go to homo sapiens, intelligence. Where did that come from? These mysteries.
I think where that skeptical comments were coming from were also just the general skepticism of science. I think from the pandemic, people, maybe a failure of institutions and so on, they... there's been a growing distrust of science. And it's not so much that it's anti-evolution, it's more of a stepping back and saying, wait a minute, maybe scientists don't have it all figured out.
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Chapter 7: What role does love play in the human condition?
What are the deep mysteries there to you?
We are nothing but chemical systems capable of formulating or answering questions about our own existence.
We humans or all of life, you think?
Humans. Humans are... I mean, the fact that we even have this conversation about our place in the universe is, at least to our knowledge, is quite specific to our own chemical species. But...
Yeah, it's kind of wild. We're introspecting on our evolutionary history, and we're just a couple of organisms.
Yes.
We're like another organism listening to this, and they're mind blown. There's like three organisms, two of them talking, and the third one's like, holy shit.
I think that understanding the – what I really find interesting about understanding origin of life or even contemplating about our own place in the universe, if at the end of this would come down to appreciating or even before appreciating, really truly comprehending what it is that we got here.
That to me is a huge gain because there's no single question in biology, I think, that will deliver that magnitude of that message and understanding, but understanding how life here started at first place, if we truly comprehend that. This is not a concept that is well thought in schools. We ask students to memorize these concepts. If they are lucky, they learned RNA world.
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Chapter 8: How can young people cultivate a fulfilling life and career?
It certainly puts humans in their proper perspective, that we're not just because we have brains and brains are intelligent, doesn't mean we're the most intelligent thing, because ultimately, the whole mechanism of nature seems to be orders of magnitude more intelligent.
All of it, like we're a hierarchy of organisms that have a history of several billion years, and that all somehow came together to make a human. And there'll be life after us, just as there was life before us. And something that comes after will be perhaps even more fascinating.
I think when you understand the magnitude of what happened here, there is no room for arrogance. It should overwhelm you and humiliate. It's pretty humiliating.
Yeah.
It's quite amazing what happened here. And there is no other discipline that will... but exploring our own origins and looking at life as a more planetary system phenomena rather than one single species at a time, a collective look.
You mentioned this question in your TED Talk is, the two possibilities of the universe being full of life and the universe being empty and we're the only life in the universe. How do you feel about both options? Just actually you as a single chemical organism introspecting about its existence in this world.
It's having a planet full of life is interesting because there are, we talked about life being all about chemistry, exploring solutions. And having solutions in front of you is great. It's beneficial, right?
Solutions being different organisms. Like other humans, you see them as a solution to a chemistry problem.
Oh, that's an interesting solution.
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