Yesterday I had a fascinating conversation with the brilliant synthetic biologist George Church. This rare interdisciplinary dialogue was recorded for a new podcast series coordinated by Rick Coyle, founder of Accelerator Media, an American nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging curiosity and pursuing lifelong learning through educational media. The format of this new podcast brings together two experts from different fields for a non-hosted conversation on topics that connect or intrigue both participants. Our podcast is expected to air on January 16, 2025.
George and I discussed life in the cosmos, from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, to the distant future. The chemistry of life as we know it could have begun shortly after the first stars formed, about 100 million years after the Big Bang, in regions enriched in heavy elements by the first exploding stars. If what we find on Earth were representative, it would have taken billions of years for a complex multicellular life form to emerge from a soup of chemicals, which would explain why we exist so late in cosmic history.
Life on Earth could have originated on Mars, which cooled earlier than Earth due to its smaller size. The heavy bombardment from Mars could have lifted rocks that reached Earth with small astronauts in the form of Martian microbes, 4.2 billion years before Elon Musk desired to send human astronauts to Mars.
If mirror life was delivered to Earth from outside, was suppressed by Earth life and had no major impact. There may be aliens among us, but we don’t notice them. This reminded me of the unwarranted concerns about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN producing mini black holes that could consume the Earth. Cosmic rays routinely strike hadrons in Earth’s atmosphere with larger center-of-mass energies and have not caused a single catastrophe during the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence.
I asked George if there is any local evidence that life on Earth could have been seeded by an alien gardener? He agreed that this is a viable hypothesis worth exploring because there are some unexplained gaps in our understanding of how complex life emerged on Earth.
Ambitious alien scientists and engineers could have tried seeding fertile planets like Earth with self-replicating probes. If the ‘gardeners’ were technological platforms with artificial intelligence (AI), their creators would undoubtedly have recognized the great advantages of chemistry in using raw earth materials and converting the local soup of chemicals into self-replicating machines in the form of complex life as we know it. In that case the vision is inspired by that of John von Neumann self-replicating machines Earth life as we know it is of extraterrestrial origin!
von Neumann proposed his abstract idea lectures delivered to the University of Illinois in 1948 and 1949, before the discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Three decades after von Neumann’s lectures, Freeman Dyson suggested the concept of Astro chicken in his book ‘Disrupting the Universe’. Dyson envisioned a spacecraft that weighs one kilogram and represents a mix of biology, microelectronics and artificial intelligence that creates self-replicating probes in space.
I confessed to George that I am in awe of biological life. After all, the human brain consumes 20 watts and performs many tasks better than the best AI systems we have developed to date, which consume gigawatts of power. Multimodal analysis sits at the unresolved intersection of Machine Learning analysis, while the human brain routinely combines data from our eyes, ears and touch.
I asked George about his hopes for the future of humanity. Only one century has passed since the discovery of quantum mechanics and so we may only have another century to go before our civilization technologically destroys itself. George added that our technological progress is accelerating and existential risks are increasing rapidly. The end of human history on Earth will likely occur long before the sun evaporates all of Earth’s oceans in a billion years.
I noted that the key to survival would lie in our ability to escape from the rock on which we were born on a habitable space platform. Humanity could survive as long as it shifts its priority away from investing $2.4 trillion per year military budget to invest the same amount in space exploration.
I don’t expect peace-loving hippies to rule the world. Instead, I realistically hope that discovering aliens as smarter students in our class of intelligent technological civilizations will inspire us to do better. Our Messiah may come from another star.
Regarding our future, George noted that the human brain will likely expand and become much more powerful in the coming decades. He also believes that our generation will be the first to have the ability not to die, because synthetic biology will be able to repair the steady damage done to our bodies in the coming decades.
Given his prediction, George and I agreed to continue our conversation for the next millennia. I wonder what we might be talking about in a million years, when science and technology will advance far beyond what we imagine today. I don’t mind adding alien scientists to the conversation. But I will insist on a remote setup for that podcast recording because I’m concerned about the aliens infecting George and me with mirror pathogens.
