Sean Carroll: Understanding the Origin of Life is Within the Reach of Science | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | (gentle music)
00:00:02.580 | - What kind of questions can science not currently answer,
00:00:11.800 | but might soon?
00:00:12.820 | When you think about the problems and the mysteries
00:00:16.760 | before us, that may be within reach of science.
00:00:20.760 | - I think an obvious one is the origin of life.
00:00:23.240 | We don't know how that happened.
00:00:24.840 | There's a difficulty in knowing how it happened historically,
00:00:28.240 | actually, literally on earth,
00:00:30.200 | but starting life from non-life is something
00:00:33.460 | I kind of think we're close to, right?
00:00:35.360 | We're really-- - You really think so?
00:00:37.000 | How difficult is it to start life?
00:00:39.720 | - Well, I've talked to people,
00:00:42.100 | including on the podcast about this.
00:00:43.900 | Life requires three things.
00:00:46.320 | Life as we know it.
00:00:47.200 | So there's a difference with life,
00:00:48.480 | which who knows what it is,
00:00:50.120 | and life as we know it,
00:00:51.080 | which we can talk about with some intelligence.
00:00:53.760 | So life as we know it requires compartmentalization.
00:00:56.800 | You need like a little membrane around your cell.
00:00:59.600 | Metabolism, you need to take in food and eat it
00:01:01.920 | and let that make you do things.
00:01:04.000 | And then replication, okay?
00:01:05.560 | So you need to have some information about who you are
00:01:07.560 | that you pass down to future generations.
00:01:10.840 | In the lab, compartmentalization seems pretty easy,
00:01:14.720 | not hard to make lipid bilayers
00:01:16.720 | that come into little cellular walls pretty easily.
00:01:19.720 | Metabolism and replication are hard,
00:01:22.220 | but replication we're close to.
00:01:24.880 | People have made RNA-like molecules in the lab
00:01:27.920 | that I think the state of the art is
00:01:31.800 | they're not able to make one molecule
00:01:33.640 | that reproduces itself,
00:01:35.020 | but they're able to make two molecules
00:01:36.560 | that reproduce each other.
00:01:38.240 | So that's okay, that's pretty close.
00:01:40.080 | Metabolism is harder, believe it or not,
00:01:44.000 | even though it's sort of the most obvious thing,
00:01:45.860 | but you want some sort of controlled metabolism.
00:01:47.920 | And the actual cellular machinery in our bodies
00:01:50.480 | is quite complicated.
00:01:51.680 | It's hard to see it just popping into existence
00:01:53.920 | all by itself.
00:01:54.760 | It probably took a while,
00:01:56.720 | but we're making progress.
00:01:59.080 | And in fact, I don't think we're spending
00:02:00.240 | nearly enough money on it.
00:02:01.560 | If I were the NSF, I would flood this area with money
00:02:04.780 | 'cause it would change our view of the world
00:02:08.200 | if we could actually make life in the lab
00:02:09.760 | and understand how it was made originally here on Earth.
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