as a 67 year old it's odd to hear "from the 60's - i wasn't alive then" it feels like, am i a brain in a jar? did the planet only just start? i can't explain how refreshing it is to hear people talking about the origin of life without arguing creationist crap. to hear someone laugh about how experiments haven't worked, and to have sean admit he knows little about the subject but still have his questions answered without even the slightest wiff of BS. brilliant female guests on this show, going to be one of my favourites. for the sake of trying to sound clever, i always think evolution isn't 'survival of the fittest' but that it should be looked at from the opposite perspective, it's 'death of the least fit'. the creatures that mutate and survive are never 'perfect' for their environment, and the environment itself is always changing, what dictates evolution is the creatures that die out, and i imagine (!) the ratio to creatures that 'make it' to creatures that don't is reasonably high. which leads me to my pet theory - life is common. you almost touched on this, but my feeling is life is common and has taken on lots of forms, but it gets killed off quickly. like thermal vents, life is "beginning" around vents, but it gets killed off because we already have life to gobble it up. anyway. spitballing. 1:02:00 this seems to be going in another favourite direction of mine, it might be that intelligent life is rare, we seem to have increasing levels of 'what if' going on here, even when i was a kid i disagreed with the statistics that aliens should be common, sure the numbers make sense, but since when has the universe worried about numbers?

Happy monday professor and everybody

The was one of your better interviews. Thank you.

Amazing episode and absolutely fascinating. Very happy that we are getting to a place where the various disciplines are converging to develop a larger image of existence on the whole, as I truly believe all is connected and crucial to compiling an accurate image of what this all is. Thank you, as always, Dr. Carroll, and happy early Birthday from a fellow Libra!

Saw the name Betül - I know she works on ancestral sequence reconstruction - so this was an instant like from me!

Early in the podcast, it occurs to me, that at some point in the past, biology, geology, and cosmology (and more - - obliges) come together and become a study of the same thing.

I love her wide knowledge across many disciplines

Good job Betül abla

ive just finished the "rifters trilogy" by peter watts, and this podcast is the best addendum you can find.

Hello professor!

I'm not putting this forward as a high likelihood solution, but the discourse about the level of complexity that seems fundamental made me think of Boltzmann Brains, which involves the possible outcomes within degrees of freedom of a nearly infinite or infinite system. Is it possible that life literally sprang into existence because we live in a universe with an enormous range of possibilities for the arrangement of matter, and the specific arrangement we think led to the genesis of biology occurred here on earth, purely as a matter of cosmic chance? Fermi's paradox is suggestive in this direction (of intelligent life, and possibly all life, being rare within a given spacial radius, such as the horizon of the visible universe). Science is most confident when it can trace a replicable series of precise transitions with identifiable steps of cause and effect, but fundamental physics suggests things may happen which are not causal in the simple way we ordinarily think about causality. The ideas related to Boltzmann brains allows for the possibility of duplicate planets, solar systems, whole galaxies, conscious brains, etc., appearing spontaneously, so why not the initial configuration of chemical relationships that form the foundation of biology on earth, which seems comparatively more likely than some of the more fanciful possibilities such as the spontaneous appearance of our entire visible patch of the universe? Note: it is suggested that because we find life appearing on earth almost as soon as planetary conditions settle down sufficiently for the chemical stability necessary, it can be inferred that simple life forms are likely common throughout our galaxy... but early appearance may simply be pre-requisite for the evolution of complex forms of life, including intelligent life (i.e., it takes a very long time for intelligent life forms to evolve from the simplest organisms). Early appearance of simple organisms could be extremely rare and the Anthropic Principle may best explain, if it turns out that life very rarely springs from the rocks of planetary surfaces. The general scientific bias against special conditions often applies and benefits scientific understanding, but at least some features of the physical world are likely to be long-shots! The existence of intelligent life on earth may be one of them. Philosophically speaking, one of the most striking features of existence (having the characteristics we observe) is it's extreme improbability. This kind of thing would be abhorrent for the prospects of biologist seeking a complete understanding of the origin of life, but nature may not have been pre-occupied with making the origin of life comprehensible. Regardless I wish Ms. Kaçar all the best in her pursuit of this question, which is perhaps the most interesting in all of science.

3:07 No voy a parar... Ya no tengo dudas!

Yay!

i know these questions never get answered due to paradoxes with patreon (!) but i''l ask. someone pointed out that earth is travelling at an enormous speed in a relatively (!) unknown direction, making time travel moot, my reply was that by starting with tiny increments and calibrating you can work out trajectories and solve that problem fairly easily (if you can build a time machine in the first place) but, MY defeater is that if you did travel in time when you arrive, future OR past, you now have a bigger universe, won't the laws of conservation prevent that? can you increase the amount of matter in the universe? is this what dark matter is, time travellers bodies? lol?

- "the mindscape audience are not experts" Me: How dare you insult our intelligence sir Also me: goes back to playing beer pong

A sort of reverse engineering of life as we know it, Jim.

1:11:00 this is another pet topic of mine, legacy. we assume our children will be the next generation, and somehow that makes the fact we will die and not see any of the future bearable, kind of, but this question comes up about AI, i say who cares if AI 'take over', we aren't going to be here to see it and as long as they aren't actively killing people off, they are just the next gen humans, likewise this 'seedling stars' (james blish) they may not even be human as such. but it will at least be a lagacy. if infinity is a thing, and the universe is infinite, maybe the 'prometheus' movie isn't so sci-fi, maybe humans were seeded, and we will be doing some seeding, and there never was an original life form, it's just cycled and recycled.

Aha türk.

👍

Your killing "sss" hold me till the last of episode.

because it's not just us 'intelligent' beings,, earth has the only life we know... we back up data off site, we need to back up life off planet.. idk, I thought we humans should leave and stop destroying the only place that has life... people should go to Mars, its in bad shape, no life, we prolly won't ruin it...

When comparing modern dna to ancient dna, it is probably worth considering the effects on dna from a pole flip, which could possibly have a strong influence on genetics, perhaps causing a growth or widening/branching out. It is believed by some placing a magnet under a potted plant can influence it's growth, so perhaps this approach could be applied to human genetics/growth also. Perhaps the junk dna is actually the suppressed dna from the change of poles/polarity present before the last pole flip. This may also link to the coronavirus and the gene/virus mutations as we are entering a time period of lunar and solar activity that may be influencing gravity/magnetism on earth, which probably relates to what the vikings call Ragnarok, the seal of the serpent (earth's protective layers) wreaking, breaking to create an opening, ushering in a deep freeze, a new ice age. If ice ages are believed to occur roughly every 12500 years, we are about due an ice age if this is true. Additionally, if the protective layers experience a significant weakening or temporary break, cosmic radiation could enter in high levels, potential causing an impact on life on earth, which may also relate to all the bird and sea life mass deaths the past few years. Perhaps the simpler dna organisms are waking up or mutating, and causing a chain reaction that affects the food chain. It's alot of speculation, but can it be ruled out as possibilities or not?

She likes to start sentences with SO....