"What do you see in the future of astrobiology?" "Icy moons" "Hey, so do I!"

As someone who works in ML and does not agree that we are anywhere near sentient AI, I realized that a theory of life is probably directly linked to humanity creating an actual sentient AI. A breakthrough in one will likely lead to a breakthrough in the other. That is a very interesting idea to me.

Great interview. There seems to be good self examination going on these days by scientists about what scientists are doing. Heartening to see. The future is bright with Dr. Smith and Dr. Mathis on the job.

34:50 I gotta say that it isn't just the answers in this channel that blows my mind, but even the questions I've never even thought about before. Like, this here goes all the way back to the basics but is nevertheless a stunning question: why do we have multicellular eukaryotic life and not multicellular prokaryotic life? Wow!

Fantastic interview. Thank you.

These interviews are great value, Fraser, thank you.

What a fantastic interview!! You are a super star Fraser, The subject of "What is life" is a fascinating subject that is a bit like watching a Star Trek movie for the first time haha. It is amazingly complex and also seemingly simple at first. To me a bit like asking the question: What is a God! If we do ever discover life forms on other worlds it begs the question of do we interfere with that life if it is a more simple form? Or if it is way more advanced and intelligent then we are..then what happens? Fascinating and complex. Thank You Fraser.

It would be so amazing to discover non dna life. I get so excited by the number of questions it could answer.

Brilliant interview Fraser, attacking multiple thorny, but related matters in one interview is just great. One of the issues we have is human bias, we think we are intelligent and we think we know what intelligence is, but as the interview highlighted, we do not even understand life, we still have researchers debating whether viruses are alive or whether they are simply complex organic structures capable of replication once inside a cell. With regards looking for life - wow, difficult, as Harrison and Cole pointed out, determining whether the spectra from a given atmosphere indicates that life exists is at the very hairy limit of both our knowledge and technology. We need to understand the environment within which the gas detections exist, but that is bordering on the impossible at this time because without visiting a world, its all educated guesses. We need to understand how abiotic processes could create DMS or Phosphine, because understanding this helps to narrow the bandwidth when we find DMS and Phosphine signatures in exoplanet atmospheres, if we find there is no way nature makes these chemicals without life being involved, that moves our knowledge forward, but this requires a lot of funding to investigate the myriad environments where abiotic processes could, in theory, create these chemicals. Finding purely industrial chemicals would be a major find, but this is highly improbable.

I am kind of really interested in what Cole meant about the future of computation and chemistry...

That was a great discussion, but I'm still waiting for the step by step guide to detecting life outside of earth as the title promised. Might be a good video for you to create!

Excellent interview.

wonderful vid loved it learned a lot

Love your channel, Fraser.

I enjoyed this interview to no end.

One of the best, dude. Cheers 🤘😎🤘

Step 1: Locate alien life Step 2: ??? Step 3: profit

Great unique names Cole Harrison and Frasier!

Amazing Thanks!

Thank you!

This is excellent, thought-provoking stuff. Some of the discussion of limits of our knowledge regarding life brings to mind the Miller-Urey experiment. From what I've read, that experiment may have initially given the impression that creating life was 'easy', but of course it wasn't long before the thinking became more muted. It's been noted that creating amino acids isn't a big deal in the scheme of things and that it's about as far from actual life as a brick is from the Empire State Building.

Totally agree on needing a more set theory and definition. How can we determine non Earth life when we can't even decide if viruses are living. If we found virus like things in space would we call that life or not???

Dr Harrison smiths roof light looks like a funny hat 🧢 Great show Fraser as always

When we can detect life on distant planets with complete certainty we are going to see life everywhere in the universe. The first one is the tricky one ;)

Take a drink every time they say "Community". HA! 🤣

Maybe I'm very stupid right now, but couldn't life be quite easily defined as an entropy anomaly, in the sense that it has an "unnatural" high internal order resp. low internal entropy in relation to its surroundings, which it maintains by (at least eventually) some consumption of energy in its surroundings? I know there are some life forms that can take looong pauses, but isn't this still the main core of life's whole mechanism? Maybe I'm being too academic.

This is an excellent, stimulating video. Nothing here has changed my view that intelligent life exists here and nowhere else in the Milky Way. Prove me wrong!

Why do we seem to only look for simple organic molecules like 1-Carbon molecules? Can we not detect 2C (ethane) or 3C (propane) molecules that will make it more likely to be from an organism? Is there just not enough if it in the atmosphere?

Did you ever see the film “Europa Report”? Sort of a Blair Witch horror but way better, very ‘realistic in the coming decades’ sci-fi on par with the Martian

Life is the ultimate catalyst.

I recall viewing the Milky Way through a telescope when I was in my teens. Countless stars is the only description I can give for what I saw. To detect techno signals requires a lot of energy expenditure, and a lot money being thrown into prolonged, persistent, high resolution coverage over the whole sky for a very long time. We are quickly coming to the conclusion that it may be almost impossible to detect sentient life near other stars.

I imagine a survey largely based on the known evolution of our own atmosphere that kicks out something like 10k planets < 1% life, 1k ~10%, dozens of curious anomalies and several strong candidates; Or at least I hope so

The Fermi paradox means that the chance of finding techno signatures in our galaxy or in nearby galaxies is virtually zero. Looking for techno signatures in distant galaxies (> 100 Mly) is probably just as hard as looking for trees on a nearby exoplanet.

Is there a someon e we can reach out to if we come into contact?

Who can I reach out to if I come into contact

For communication over distance, could starlink project be used to send out thousands of small communication satellites into interplanetary space within solar system to prop up future mission communication channels?

My question is what would a swarm of satellites look like? Earth has thousands of satellites and debris orbiting the planet, in another 50 years, this will only increase? But is it possible to “see” this swarm from light years away? What would be needed to see them?

What is live?

It occurs to me, there are definitions or theories of life that are not necessarily bound to DNA/RNA, but the ones I know of kind of require getting up close, and into the microscopic. If a stable property of life is that it is small, say microbe to whale in our terms, then this is not a great topic for astronomy. Astrophysics yes, but astronomy is going to have some hard limits.

Since life can look any number of ways that even by current methods of observation could still remain invisible to us, than why even look outside of the solar system? wouldn't most the ingredients for unorthodox life forms exist in the other planets extreme composition nearby? I Think what most of us are thinking is that there are many other systems similar to ours, that have been around for much longer, surely there is technology more advanced searching like we have for life. The universe is vast, signals and light take time to travel, have patience and don't make life so cryptic

wow Fraser you have so many subscribers 🙀

Mast!!!!!

Question: what would happen if you fired a rocket in a methane atmosphere? I understand oxygen is required for combustion, what level of oxygen or other elements would make things...interesting? 🔥

When it comes to finding life, we have to work with what we know, because don't know anything else. That's just kinda a limitation inherent to all sciences.

The ability too move or take an action ? Too violate entropy ?

Would a strong oxygen signal in an exoplanet atmosphere be conclusive evidence of life?

Resume @34:30

While the existence of extraterrestrial life is an interesting and important question, I can't help wondering if the emphasis placed on it is in part for the benefit of nonscientists who won't be motivated by "there's a moon out there, let's study it". Give them a specific target of investigation, something anyone can appreciate.

If the Roman Empire existed on Mars as it did on Earth, It would have no idea that we were here until they found landers from us.

I was surprised by a few things in this interview, of particular the level of candor by your guests to admit that there is a concern for funding people’s careers in potentially superfluous fields of study. I personally don’t think that astrobiology is a field that needs very many members amongst its ranks to achieve the nothing results we currently possess in discovering non-human life with the pitiful equipment and methods we have utilized to date. Slowing progress as a means of justifying a bs career is one of the shadiest things people in the sciences are guilty of doing…

Maybe finding intelligent life is most interesting. We know DNA/RNA based life can be a little bit intelligent, but maybe life could be an inorganic form. My thought is intelligent life would consume energy and likely use electric energy with some form of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected.

Isn't it quite naive to think anyone can come up with a theory of life using a sample size of one (1!) biosphere and then expect it to be universal? Let's go search for anomolies and the unexpected and discuss the cases as they arrise. Sorry, but I don't think these guys are going to provide any new insights. But it was a fun interview. Thx!

Dark forest theory

Some time in the not too distant future we will discover a dormant robotic probe in our solar system. When we many years later manage to start to extract its data and decode it, it will contain a full sensory history of life on our planet, punctuated with an interval of 100.000 years, for the past 500 million years. This could happen.

this might be pedantic af but I feel like if you can't even define 'life' then is there really a point in looking for it? what I'm saying is it's just a word we made up which can have fairly fuzzy meaning attached to it like most language it works fine as long as it conveys info tho, but language isn't really very precise, and if you decide to precisely define it I think it just becomes circular I think it's enough to just search and observe more specific things and build from there tbh

Maybe we have not heard from aliens because if they get much more advanced they figure out how to create their own alternative/parallel universes which are much nicer than this one, so go into them and loose all desire to return, like the lotus eaters.

I don't think you will find life from orbit. You will actually have to land on that planet or moon to find out.

What alien life. What the very end of War of the Worlds and it tell you why at best life on Earth would destroy aliens and also why humans could never go to a planet with alien life on it.

Personally I think we'll find the universe to be teeming with life, but most of it will be microbial/ non-complex.

NASA should probe Uranus

We all know what alive is.

I learned in school that viruses were not alive yet they contain DNA. Has that changed?

Why do scientists feel alien life will have telescopes? Why do we think aliens will be searching for anything?

Question: If Jupiter was four times more massive and made only by deuterion, it would be a Brown Dwarf?

Some KZfaqr is going to teraform a planet to make his thumbnail true to protect his income stream.

An interesting but somehow depressing video. I believe that life is unique and not subject to any cosmological principle. Just as Fraser published this unique video on KZfaq a specific time after the Big Bang, life emerged on our planet uniquely a specific time after the Big Bang. This may sound a bit boring, but as long as no one can prove otherwise to me, there is no reason to abandon this belief. And if I understood the two young scientists, who I really like, correctly, there is currently no way for us to detect any life that may exist outside of our solar system. Topic closed 😁

Until recently, people assumed a lifeforce existed. Perhaps we should revisit old insights.

The hour hand on a clock ⏰️ spins 2x as fast as earth 🌎 spins

❤🫀❤

When you live life in christ, you are actually able to see life beyond the galaxy . Thisnis something the scientists will never reach to become it is beyond morality and astro world have no idea of this side od life. Either they know and ignore the fact .

Deeply thinking.... right. Try thinking about the 2004 USS Nimitz case. Or David Grusch.

How could you prove There was never life on mars? Getting a bit religious for my liking!

Hey I'm alien I make cool video pac poetry rapper and alien songs in night I'm full alien I have a big forehead it make Shadow over my eye every where I go I'm a alien I also have fish galil on ears I look like squid people eat ever since I turn alien I don't eat squids but other I'll in joy

Like like, you know, sort of, like like

Probably need to detect a 10000 watt transmitter in another galaxy.

Beep

The guy wants to look for life in a sea of methane good luck

a drinking game with youknow? sigh...

Actual Steps To Finding Alien Life... Step 1: Recover crashed craft Step 2: Extract lifeforms from said craft Step 3: Hide evidence

4:10 no, there is no life on Venus, never was, never will be, sorry.

Believing in aliens is just as silly as believing in Bigfoot. 👽👽👽

Dislike. I didn't enjoy this interview.

Really don't think that there is any life as we know it, humanoid, anywhere elsewhere in the galaxy let alone the universe.

Have these guys not been paying attention to the senate hearings? what about all the videos coming out and respected professional people telling their stories? 100% there is other life but maybe they do't bother with us as it would be like us trying to talk to a worm.

Probably need to detect a 10000 watt transmitter in another galaxy.