(gentle music) - What kind of questions can science not currently answer, but might soon? When you think about the problems and the mysteries before us, that may be within reach of science. - I think an obvious one is the origin of life. We don't know how that happened. There's a difficulty in knowing how it happened historically, actually, literally on earth, but starting life from non-life is something I kind of think we're close to, right?

We're really-- - You really think so? How difficult is it to start life? - Well, I've talked to people, including on the podcast about this. Life requires three things. Life as we know it. So there's a difference with life, which who knows what it is, and life as we know it, which we can talk about with some intelligence.

So life as we know it requires compartmentalization. You need like a little membrane around your cell. Metabolism, you need to take in food and eat it and let that make you do things. And then replication, okay? So you need to have some information about who you are that you pass down to future generations.

In the lab, compartmentalization seems pretty easy, not hard to make lipid bilayers that come into little cellular walls pretty easily. Metabolism and replication are hard, but replication we're close to. People have made RNA-like molecules in the lab that I think the state of the art is they're not able to make one molecule that reproduces itself, but they're able to make two molecules that reproduce each other.

So that's okay, that's pretty close. Metabolism is harder, believe it or not, even though it's sort of the most obvious thing, but you want some sort of controlled metabolism. And the actual cellular machinery in our bodies is quite complicated. It's hard to see it just popping into existence all by itself.

It probably took a while, but we're making progress. And in fact, I don't think we're spending nearly enough money on it. If I were the NSF, I would flood this area with money 'cause it would change our view of the world if we could actually make life in the lab and understand how it was made originally here on Earth.

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