Professor Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist whose research focuses on the origins of life, artificial life, and the detection of life on other worlds. She is the author of “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence.” https://search.asu.edu/profile/1731899 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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So your subject matter is so fascinating to me. So first, please explain what this idea of assembly theory.
Yeah. Assembly theory is born out of an interest in solving the origin of life and finding aliens. So that's sort of the motivation. I think it's really important to be clear about that to start because it introduces some kind of radical reconceptions of the way we think about fundamental physics, at least I think so.
But the key idea of the theory is that the universe cannot generate complexity outside of living processes. And so we have a way of formalizing what seems kind of intuitively obvious that the universe doesn't generate complex objects for free. And we do this with this idea of assembly theory of thinking about the assembly space, which is like the space of all constructible objects.
And you can talk about the complexity in that space as a minimal number of steps for making an object. And if you see objects that require a lot of steps to make them and they're in high abundance, life is the only thing that can make them.
Wow. So this includes plant life.
This includes everything, technology, everything on your table, you know, requires billions of years of evolution, evolution of intelligence and technology to generate. So.
When you say life to generate, what about like crystals? And what about, have you ever seen that enormous cave in Mexico where they have these insane crystal structures?
Is that the one that's like hot inside?
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