Rethinking Astrobiology's Biggest Questions About Life Through New Physics with Dr. Sara Walker
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- Опубліковано 21 лис 2024
- Our guest is Dr. Sara Imari Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and discovering alien life on other worlds. She is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early-Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental theory for understanding what life is.
Want to know more about Sara's work? Watch this video all about Universal Life Detection, Astrobiology, & Assembly Theory: • Universal Life Detecti...
astrobiology.n...
What is Ask An Astrobiologist?
Once a month, the NASA Astrobiology Program host a one-hour program where the public is invited to interact with a high-profile astrobiologist, who replies to Twitter and UA-cam comment questions live on video.
Ask An Astrobiologist: Episode 71
Rethinking Astrobiology's Biggest Questions About Life Through New Physics
Featuring Dr. Sara Imari Walker (Arizona State University)
Hosted by Dr. Graham Lau (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science)
Production Assistants:
Sarah Treadwell (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science)
Anurup Mohanty (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science)
Mariam Naseem (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science)
Directed by Mike Toillion (NASA Astrobiology Program)
Illustrations by Melissa Flower (melissaflower.com)
Music & Animation by Mike Toillion (NASA Astrobiology Program)
I want to meet her so bad!!!!! She’s awesome. She can explain stuff so good.
She's a gem. If I hosted parties, I'd invite her to every single one.
Philosophers' obsession with definitions is usually pointless, but in this case (the only case?), the search for a definition does have a practical application. To recognize life, it is indeed useful to define it, in the most general way. It is reassuring that someone is actually working on this.
I had the good fortune of taking a class taught by Dr. Walker at ASU. She is brilliant!
That's awesome!
Not gonna lie, I’d repeat the class just to watch her rock that jacket…
What do you do now?
@peanutkaboom6004 - That's wonderful. I wonder, though, is the vocal fry as noticeable in person? I worked hard to get rid of mine, so I am sensitive to it now.
Recent research have formally demonstrated that Assembly Theory (AT) closely mirrors established theories like Shannon entropy and LZ compression, yet fails to cite them properly; moreover, it is fundamentally wrong and intrinsically fails to do what their authors claim it to do (ie., AT is not only a concerning form of plagiarism, bur fundamentally flawed). AT is actually a weaker version of these well-known concepts. This situation highlights the risks of overhyping ideas that lack sufficient originality . Relevant material includes a paper in npj Systems Biology and Applications ("On the salient limitations of Assembly Theory"), "Assembly Theory is a weak version of algorithmic complexity based on LZ compression that does not explain or quantify selection or evolution" (published in PLOS Complex systems), and blog posts by Dr. Hector Zenil (one including a review of Sara Walker's most recent book: "Life as Everybody Knows it. Book Review: ‘Life As No One Knows It’ by Sara Imari Walker", who argues that AT undermines scientific integrity through misleading claims.
Thank you both very much for sharing your time, work, knowledge and experience in the public arena, peace
And thanks for watching!
Such a beautiful human, Sara. ❤ love her intelligence.
I'm not a member of the astrobiology field, but am a molecular geneticist & biologist involved in earlier days of genomic sciences. As to how you get to a living cell or microorganism requires a lot of chemistry trying to explain how you got to nucleic acids, nucleic acid polymerization & replication etc etc. It seems to me that many explorations or assumptions of how life began don't yet explain this satisfactorily. or tend to ignore it in favor of protein chemistry. The best lectures I ever heard on this early chemistry and the necessary types of processes & compartmentalizations needed to get to a protocell were by Jack Szostak. Thoughts on this?
Jack definitely has shared some incredible ideas from that realm of thought. I would argue that you might really enjoy Sara Walker's book, Life as No One Knows It, especially as she specifically address some of those issues in the book and in her presentation of Assembly Theory as one way of looking at the lineage of molecular developments required for life to originate.
@@cosmobiologist Thank you! Will do so.
I just bought it on Audible.
First check on Jack Szostak's early work with RNAs from random mixes;
David P. Bartel Jack W. Szostak
1993 “Isolation of New Ribozymes from a Large Pool of Random Sequences” Science261,1411-1418(1993).DOI:10.1126/science.7690155
Ekland, EH, JW Szostak, and DP Bartel
1995 "Structurally complex and highly active RNA ligases derived from random RNA sequences" Science 21 July 1995: Vol. 269. no. 5222, pp. 364 - 370
39:00 what a great to explain the limitation of AI currently.
Can we get an open, responsible and detailed episode of NASA’s current understanding of non-human intelligence, especially considering the recent developments in what we see online?
Awesome call with octopus intelligence as a very different origin creating utterly different perceptive consciousness
She didn't have to worry about altering her present by interfering with her past self during her answer to that question. The present is a product of the past. So any change a time traveler would make in the past, has already been taken into account in their present. Time travel stories don't tend to go by that logic though because it would be boring, with the present/future not actually being alterable. (Could say we basically live in a Fibonacci timeline. past + present = future, as the present becomes a new past and the future becomes a new present)
The greatest intellectual invention of human mind : Calculus.
Man has a very long history of technology. Think all the stone tools, the fantastic spears, arrows, controlling/using fire etc. Those will be 30 to 200 thousand years ago I think.
Yeah. One could argue that doing "science" is just the progression of survival, which is what life has been doing from the moment it appeared.
As a historian I know we must sell ideas and “searching for life” sells, but should we actually only hold on terminologies like life? 😉😁 For example: a virus doesn’t live but it reproduces when they have a host and there are even viruses that work in other ways. Maybe there are a lot of things that eventually reproduce but that are even less “unliving” as those already “unliving” viruses. I mean… I understand we need criteria to make it possible to measure what we want to investigate but we could also mis reproducing things if we only concentrate on things we already think to know. I know that we in the past missed also a lot of “scientific black swans” till there where people brave enough to questions how many of the white ones could possibly also be black ones because it was more easy to nourish the possible white colour of all of them.😉🙂
round earth vs flat earth approaches to perception
Betelgeuse the star. ua-cam.com/video/jOGIxSF0j2s/v-deo.htmlsi=AZniGMqoejycBcdz
Sirius the star by an amateur astronomer. ua-cam.com/video/Og27UJNHOns/v-deo.htmlsi=mwkr0DDPnIAbf7Pr