This is a clip from a conversation with Sean Carroll on the Artificial Intelligence podcast. You can watch the full conversation here: http://bit.ly/315QhfC If you enjoy these, consider subscribing, sharing, and commenting below.

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Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology. He is the author of several popular books: one on the arrow of time called From Eternity to Here, one on the Higgs boson called The Particle at the End of the Universe, and one on science and philosophy called The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. He has an upcoming book on Quantum Mechanics that you can preorder now called Something Deeply Hidden. He writes one of my favorite blogs on his website preposterousuniverse.com. I recommend clicking on the Greatest Hits link that lists accessible, interesting posts on the arrow of time, dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, general relativity, string theory, quantum mechanics, and meta questions about the philosophy of science, God, Ethics, Politics, Academia, and much much more. Finally, and perhaps most famously, he is the host of a podcast called Mindscape that you should subscribe to and support on Patreon.

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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 1 is the origin of life.

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?

Well, I've talked to people, including on the podcast, about this.

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.

OK, 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 1 molecule that reproduces itself, but they're able to make 2 molecules that reproduce each other.

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.

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 because 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.


Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 1: I think an obvious 1 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...

Speaker 0: You really think so? Like how difficult is it to start life? I do.

Speaker 1: Well, I've talked to people, including on the podcast, about this. You know, life requires 3 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. OK, 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 1 molecule that reproduces itself, but they're able to make 2 molecules that reproduce each other. So that's OK. 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. 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 because 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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Sean Carroll: Understanding the Origin of Life is Within the Reach of Science | AI Podcast Clips