Famous Inorganic Chemist on Why He Believes Aliens Exist, The Revolutionary Experiments That Could Create Life & How AI Companies Are Deceiving Us
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We haven't seen aliens and life, therefore there isn't any there. The reason we haven't seen them is we don't know how to recognise them, we don't recognise how to communicate and we don't really know what intelligence is.

The Fermi Paradox was built upon a false argument. You're saying we may find a planet that has evidence that something lived there. On the average star, it's probably got several planets around it. What percentage of those stars can have life? It could be really quite high. Life on this planet is carbon-based.

What if life is not carbon-based elsewhere? The answer is almost certainly yes. It takes a massive leap of imagination. On Earth, we are a carbon life form with silicon technology. Could we flip it around and imagine a world where there's silicon life with carbon technology? We are in a big AI delusion right now. There are a number of levels where AI is being just misused and people just using it to steal money.

What's the hard problem that you're focused on and how are you approaching it? We all want to know why we're here. We all want to have a connection to the cosmos. Chemify's plan is to actually help us crack the origin of life by building the hardware to search chemical space. Solving the origin of life is not going to make life any less wonderful. It's going to make it more wonderful. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Wow. Get ready, people. Love. Love.

Aliens, artificial intelligence, consciousness, the future of spreading humanity across the galaxy. Have we found aliens? We may be looking for the wrong thing. Who is the only person who can talk about all these things? Believe it or not, it's an inorganic chemist. We've talked a lot here about life on other planets,

Are they here? Are they coming? Have they already existed? Do we know how to find them? Lee Cronin is the Regis Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, and he's the founder and CEO of Chemify. And Dr. Cronin is going to talk to us about the reason that selection of complex behavior and complex matter is

can lead us to a better understanding of how to look for life in the universe.

His perspective is it's not even that we're looking wrong. We don't even exactly understand yet how to frame the examination of life on other planets. But he is going to break down for us all the ways to think about it, to reframe it, and also to understand what that means for our lives now. He's also going to help us understand artificial intelligence. NewsAlert, he believes they are lying about.

about artificial intelligence, the future of artificial intelligence, what it can do well and what it can't. And some of the sort of more shocking statements and ideas that Lee has is that some of this news cycle is deliberately

being generated to pump up stock values and is actually, there's not evidence to support it. And in case you're wondering why a chemist can do all these things, he's going to explain to us what the process is of being an inorganic chemist. In addition, he works in computational systems. So he is someone who lives and works in code, in probability, and in understanding how we build complicated things from simple things.

So prepare to have your mind blown by Professor Lee Cronin. Lee Cronin, welcome to The Breakdown. Break it down. It's great to be here. You're our first chemist that we've had on. Really? Wow. Yep. Yep. Had a lot of physicists, a lot of internists, but never a chemist. Someone told me yesterday that chemistry is just physics with attitude. Yeah.

Well, the real reason I brought you here is to tell you that I could not get an A in organic chemistry, and it's why I didn't go to medical school. Oh, wow. I'm sorry. Wow. Yeah, it's really too bad. I actually wonder if, you know, now that I understand the things that I understand about science, if I were to go back...

Maybe I could finally master organic chemistry and give it another go. Organic chemistry is a funny one. I'm on a single crusade against it because I'm an inorganic chemist, right? Which means that I'm allowed to not know anything. Yeah.

But organic chemists pride themselves on the way they train one another. And it's actually pretty brutal. Can you explain for people who don't kind of know, you know, for many people, when they hear chemist, they think like that's the person at the pharmacy. Can you talk to us about what it means to be, in your case, a regis and, you know, an expert on inorganic chemistry?

Yeah, so chemistry obviously is the central science in between physics and biology and a bunch of other things. And chemistry is just about the electrons. Where are the electrons? And matter. So doing material science, making molecules, designing drugs, making dyes. Literally, like I said, chemistry really is physics with attitude, right? And it's because...

When you start to consider complicated systems, lots of electrons, the chemist's job is to find out where the electrons are, to control reactivity, to get the design right. So they're probably the reason why you found organic chemistry interesting.

inspiring, annoying, whatever the word is, you have to learn these rules, right? Where do the, where, where, how do I, what is a recipe I use to make this molecule and where are the, where are the bonds and what is react, what is going to react was not going to react. So chemistry is a bit like taking the periodic table, which is the toolbox of which chemists have of all the elements and knowing about their chemistry reactivity and

I mean, I became an organic chemist because I love colour changes and also setting fire to things. So...

So I guess that's kind of the gamut of chemistry, understanding how to build molecules and materials. So in the world that we live in, we're interacting all the time with things. And those things are made of very, very small things. You take it from there and explain what you do again. Okay. So there are these things called atoms. And these atoms have a nucleus, right? And they've got protons and neutrons.

the neutrons have no charge and the protons have a positive charge. Now to balance that charge you have electrons on top and the control of those electrons in particular what we call the bonding electrons is what the chemist does. But the chemist doesn't really look and poke at the electrons, not all the time. They're really about, you know, making recipes to mix together the right materials so a reaction will occur. But actually

You've got these atoms. The atoms, they increase in charge and protons as you go from hydrogen to helium. You keep going through the periodic table, you get heavier and heavier. The more protons, the more electrons. The more electrons, the more chemical diversity. So if you take carbon, which is a really important element

um and hydrogen which is also important hydrogen is can only bond with other one other atom of itself typically called hydrogen so you have h2 carbon can do a lot more it can make four bonds with different atoms very easily and it can also have other configurations less than four bonds which means you can make chains and you can make kind of i suppose like uh imagine a a kind of uh

origami, if you like, of material that can be wrapped together. And that's what we spend our days doing.

adding these elements together, heating them up, cooling them down, making sure we can purify them to make sure they're clean and full of the, that we know what we've made. And we then spend a lot of time using very special techniques to work out what we have, a kind of type of microscope actually. And that's where you go. So periodic table, reactivity, microscope. That's what the chemist does. So given this framework,

You operate on the level of understanding, essentially, not just what things are made of, but how they interact. And as we've talked about here, we've had Adam Frank on, you know, we've had Robin Hanson on. As we've talked about, one of the things that we know is that carbon is this beautiful thing.

kind of scaffold from which you can build very reliable structures. And carbon can, you know, create all of the life forms that we have access to and all of the things that we have access to. So we live in kind of a carbon-based world, right? Our

When we talk about, I mean, you operate on the smallest level, essentially, that one can operate on, pretty much. But we're interested also in how some of the smallest concepts can apply to some of the biggest questions. So life on this planet is by and large, it's carbon-based, right? Like everything's carbon-based. And when people talk about

Could there be life on other planets? Most of us come at this from a carbon-based perspective, right? Much as if you're a materialist, you're going to approach everything from a materialist perspective. But you have this sort of notion, and part of your work is sort of explaining these concepts. What if life is not carbon-based elsewhere? How do we get there? So that's a really interesting question.

um right now life on earth it seems and it is very special because we're unique we don't know of life anywhere else so what's happening is we're looking at us and going well you know what is special about is the carbon because carbon is really important it's water water is really you know we've got liquid water all over earth right it's not frozen it's not steam it's a nice liquid and we can do stuff in the liquid and um

As an inorganic chemist, I know that elements can do lots of things, right? I could do stuff with iron, with phosphorus, with silicon. It's interesting, on Earth, we are a carbon life form with silicon technology. That's kind of cool. Could we flip it around and imagine a world where there's silicon life with carbon technology? I think the answer is almost certainly yes. But it takes a massive leap of imagination. Now, why carbon on Earth?

I can give you three very simple answers for that. First of all, the size of the Earth and the gravitational strength, right? Its position relative to the sun, so the amount of heat we're getting, okay? And the fact we've got a nice atmosphere, one atmosphere. So one atmosphere gives us enough pressure to condense water at kind of sea level, 25 degrees Celsius, right?

I have to convert to Fahrenheit. I'm sorry, I'm getting so bad at that. And so the conditions on Earth, gravity, temperature, and kind of location to the sun, and also the fact we're a rocky planet gives us all this material to play with. And it seems that the life that we have on Earth today is a reflection of the chemistry that was happening at the origin of life.

There might have been a carbon battle with silicon and the carbon started evolving and then acquired all the resource and the sunlight, if you like, and just was able to make a biosphere and that's why carbon got chosen. That's not the average view though. Lots of people think carbon is super special. It is special, but it's not special.

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So they're the other two things. What's special about carbon in particular on Earth is it can form brittle materials like you can imagine diamond.

And it can form plasticky materials like even plastics and protein and things like that, which is flexible. You can even make single layers of carbon, which conduct electricity really well. That's called graphene. It's supposed to be a wonder material that we could use to replace all the copper in our electronic circuits one day, maybe. So carbon really is very versatile and is everywhere in the universe. So...

We do know certain things that we can look for when we look for life on other planets. Adam Frank talks about this and he's literally funded by NASA to do this. He looks for...

signatures. He looks for biosignatures. He looks for kind of eco signatures. You know, if we create the mess in the ozone that we create, if there's life on other planets that are at a similar level, right, of industrial complexity, they also would be damaging the ozone. Can you explain why you don't like the Fermi paradox or why the paradox doesn't work for you?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think so. Adam, I like Adam a lot. I think he's a very gifted scientist and communicator. But I disagree with his approach entirely. But in a friendly way, not like, you know, I think it's horrible or anything like that. So I don't like the thermo paradox because I don't think we know what life is. And right now we're saying we don't see life and I'm willing to posit that.

You look up in the average star, and the average star has probably got several planets around it. And what percentage of those stars can have life? I think it could be really quite high. Because I don't think life is that weird. I think life is just what happens...

When you put energy and chemistry together and give it enough time and selection happens. And so I don't buy this thermos paradox. The reason we haven't seen them is we don't know how to recognize them. We don't recognize how to communicate and we don't really know what intelligence is. Like we're faking each other out on AI right now. It's like, look up chat GPT. It's intelligent. No, it's not. It's the internet.

compressed and it seems good so i think there's yes i've put very succinctly the thermi paradox is was built upon a false argument and that argument we haven't seen aliens and life therefore there isn't any there and i just think we don't know what to look for okay so hold on

This happens a lot. We have incredible scientists, incredible minds on the podcast who are very, very comfortable talking about things like, well, of course there's life on other planets. We're just looking for it the wrong way. This is, you know, for many of us, something that we really want to

kind of understand, not just from a fantastical level and not just from a sort of, you know, tabloid level, which is where a lot of the attention goes. But, you know, what Jonathan and I love to do here is actually find where, you know, science and the impossible come together because for people like you, like Adam Frank, like,

These are things that are actually spoken about in ways that are not teased. It's not tabloid fodder. This is a legitimate conversation. So I wonder if you can, if we could just kind of like double click a little bit.

You know, the notion of the Fermi paradox that if they if something exists that is a life form other than us, why don't we see it? To which there is this fantastic mathematical equation that we now have many more factors that we can plug in than we did when the paradox first came about, simply because the technology we have allows us to see better what's happening.

You're kind of taking a whole other perspective. You don't simply reject the Fermi paradox. You believe that essentially we're approaching it from the wrong angle, correct? Like all together. Yeah, I can give you a very simple view. Let's imagine that our solar system has drifted really far away and we don't see any stars in the sky. The only star we see is our star at center of the solar system.

So we look at that star and go, gosh, there's this star. There's nothing else. And we start to obsess about the origin of the sun, about the precise conditions that gave it, you know, is it burning coal? Is it burning uranium? Is it fission? You know, what is going on? And we obsess about this one thing. Where we are, so that's one thing, that's a star. We come back and look now, and we know, when we look up inside, there's stars everywhere. Stars being born and dying all the time.

And now with that information, we've been able to say, oh, a star is a thing that happens when hydrogen...

starts to clump together, the lightest element we know. And gravity just brings the hydrogen together. It sucks more and more in. It gets heavier and heavier and heavier. And as it gets heavier and heavier and heavier, it gets hotter and hotter and hotter. And there's a point where it just ignites. And there's enough stuff to stop it blowing up. So basically, it's like starting an engine and turning it over. And it's like lots of stars must go and like, oops, sorry, we'll go on. But when you get it in a sweet spot, you've got

nuclear fusion happening. So the origin of the Sun is to do with gravity. Gravity is the process by which stars form. You need hydrogen and that's it in a bit of time. Now let's take life. If we can define life properly, you can say what are the prerequisites for life? Well you need stuff.

And what I've come up with is a theory that suggests that there is a force in the universe we don't really yet understand, we're beginning to understand now, that is responsible for producing life in the same way the force of gravity produces suns. What is that force? It's selection.

I thought you were going to say it's God. I was like, this is going to go a totally different direction than I thought. No, no. There is no God. Well, you may call it gravity or you may call it whatever you call it. I just think it's divine because it's unbelievable that we're talking about this. Fair enough. I mean, the hair on your head is divine. Like, that's just... Like, the things that happen in the universe are amazing. Well, let's go into selection. Let's go into selection because where I think this may lead us is...

What are the factors that produce life? Because if we're looking currently for life in a way that may not be how life is in the rest of the solar system, what might it be? So let's talk first about selection. Yeah, so selection. So I'm annoying all the evolutionary biologists in the world right now. They're all grumpy.

And the reason is that this new idea that we've got experimental evidence for, if I called it a new word, right, if I made up a new word, let's call it, I don't know, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, whatever, like a fancy new word. Everyone would say, oh, Lee, you're just making up new words, right? But what I realize is that selection, although evolutionary biologists have commandeered that word to mean a special thing, there is selection that can occur before biology.

And all this coming back is like, because cells didn't just spring in like magic. I don't believe in magic. Magic is not a good answer for the origin of life. Anyway, it may be divine. That's fine, as you said about such, but magic isn't good enough. So selection is merely when the process where matter interacts with

And the matter makes a transition. And we'll use these words very carefully. And you can reel me back in and play it back out. So we're really precise because, you know, it should be easy to understand, but it requires just a bit of repetition. So you have stuff, let's call it sand. Sand blows together, clumps together. When the sand starts to turn into a well-defined material,

feature, it becomes an object. That object can do one of two things: it can persist in the environment, stay there, "Wahey!" new object, or it can get ground back into sand and blown away and it will dissipate, die, or not persist. So in a dynamic environment, that's a very important initial phrase, in a dynamic environment selection occurs,

occurs when things turn into objects and those objects, despite being under attack by the environment, can persist over time and get copied and renewed and don't turn back to dust. And that process of selection is where evolution begins. I really love this explanation and I'd like you to frame this as

in the paradigm that those of us who had to, you know, learn biology in a standard university or a graduate program

where there's a primor- and we learned this in, you know, you learned this in third grade, fourth grade, right? There's a primordial stew. There's some, you know, I mean, as I pictured it as a child, before I even knew I'd become a scientist one day, there was like a lake, which, again, it's kind of like trying to imagine what nothingness is. But I pictured this lake, and there was stuff in the lake, not realizing that the lake could only exist once the stuff had created things that allow a lake. But again-

There's like some stew and there's stuff in there. And they told us that lightning comes down and it electrifies the water. And then single-celled organisms evolve. And then one single-celled organism eats another. And then you have a multicellular organism. And then we get humans, right? That's sort of the paradigm. Where does this sand paradigm fit

into the paradigm that we've been taught is how literally we got here to have a conversation with satellites in the sky and like love in my heart for my children and all the things that happen in the universe. Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean, the short answer is no one knows because no one has been there, right? I think that's the honest answer.

In the same way that probably no one is being up close and seeing the star starting, but we have seen stars that start in the sky, right? And be able to see, oh, there was a cloud there and now there's a star. That's cool. Oh, there was a star. Now there's a black hole. Oops, you know. We haven't seen, we can see cells divide. So we can see biology continuing. We have not seen sufficient complexification to understand how,

a prebiotic environment becomes biotic. And that's a question of time scale and also it's a lack of imagination of the chemists and the prebiotic dogmatists that are saying, you know, this is how it happened and actually it has caused quite some stagnation in the field.

It could have been in a warm little pond. It could have been in the ocean. It could have been in the atmosphere. But I think we're narrowing it down and say, look, you do need an interface. You do need energy. You do need some carbon. And you need selection to occur. And what I think is the paradigm that people are really tripping over, like, you know, what I'm saying is,

Is it heretical? I don't think it's heretical, but it's annoying, right? It's like people don't want to hear it. Why? Why do you think people call you a heretic? Well, number one, they think I'm just overblowing, blowing my own trumpet, saying, you know, the assembly theory that I might tell you about in selection is the answer to everything. And I'm just overly just just making stuff up. Right. Which I'm like, no, no.

Making stuff up is making stuff up. What I'm trying to say is, hey, I love to do real-time science. I think my job as a scientist is not only to do really good science, but actually to show people what happens when new science happens. Because there is such an attack on science right now where people like

they will remain nameless saying I'm under attack and I'm not taking seriously because my theory of everything, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, your fear of everything is just BS, right? It's just because you just made it up because there's this process we go through of reasoning. And all I did said, look, science is about problems. I'm on problem. How did life start? Do we know what life is?

And that's kind of, they're two really interesting problems. Like, well, if we don't know what life is, how do we even know where it starts and under what conditions? So I just basically kept replacing the problems with simpler problems. And that's where I got back to this kind of, well, selection occurs in biology and means one thing, but there is an inorganic selection that can occur before biology because otherwise, how do you get to the cell?

and the complexity of the cell, you know, you have to rely on a creator. And I'm, my big joke is I'm not a creationist, but I want to be one. Well, if I make life in the lab, I did it. I'm the creator. I'm God. I get to become God. Now, of course, that's kind of tongue in cheek.

Because I hopefully will set up conditions that are plausible that will occur on other rocky planets. So you can go, oh, there's some rocks, there's some water, there's some carbon. There's this interesting process of complexification that occurs through selection. And look, oh, this is how evolution gets going in this environment. That looks interesting. Probably that's what happened on Earth.

Well, I just, I mean, the other conclusion is you're not just the god of this planet, you're the god of all planets. Yeah, yeah, that's the idea. Go to the Vatican and say, come on. No, I mean, joking aside, you know, it is a, I do think that we are not being brave enough nowadays and coming up with new theories. You've got crackpots saying,

You're not listening to my theory and you've got conventional science going, we're too scared to go out on a limb. And I'm like, I'm not, I mean, why be scared? Just do it. What's the worst going to happen? People can tell you're wrong. So,

My primordial stew story gets to hold, obviously with some modifications. I mean, from the time that I was in, I'm about your age, from the time I was in third grade to the time I was an undergrad, right? Like a lot had already transpired. By the time I got to graduate school, it had changed already. And it's changed, you know, already in the 20 years since I finished. So I want you to help us get from this primordial stew conversation to

to this inorganic potential for evolution, right, which you're calling selection, really in the most, you know, secular form of that word. Yes, exactly. How does that open us up to a conversation about maybe we're looking wrong or maybe the questions that we're asking about life on other planets are not even the right questions? How do we get there?

Yeah, so that's really good. So I think the way we get there is to say, look, you make certain assumptions about your primordial soup, primordial stew, right? That it's a warm pond. There may be some water, some energy, some stuff in there and things just happen. And you need the ingredients because we're working backwards from what we see in our current life.

But actually, that doesn't seem to be very plausible because we are so complicated. There's so many weird things happen. I mean, you know, what is it that decided that I was going to have an asymmetric, I don't know, internal organs and my liver is on one side and on the other. And yeah, I've got two eyes and all this stuff. Right. And of course, a lot of that was controlled by the force of gravity and the amount of material available and the need for competition.

And so selection seems to be this thing that, you know, results in a kind of chemical competition, if you like, and resources. And there's low technology. You can see the origin of life. There was no technology. There was no life.

So selection had to produce a kind of primitive technology for competition. You know, capitalism is selection, right? It is. And like all capital, you know, so that's kind of, so that's one side to get there. And the other one is like, because we've been working backwards and saying, look,

I need carbon, I need water, I need these things. We look up and say, we need oxygen, we need water, we need this, we need water, we need a Goldilocks zone, we need carbon, we need this type of atmosphere. And what it does is it allows people to make a load of pronouncements about the planet that we just don't know.

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I think when I look up in the sky and I go back to that, you know, there's, I think there's five planets, like five types of planet that can be the dead planet, never ever going to be alive. Poor, sad planet, right? Maybe it's something like Mercury. There is a planet that's prebiotic. It's getting it on, right? There's a planet with life on it that is kind of boring, you know, the first billion years of life on Earth. There's a planet with life and complex life and technology, right?

And there's a planet where all life is dead. And there might be, well, there's so many other planets, maybe two more now, but you're basically post-life and there's just technology, right? They're the kind of planets I could imagine, right? Maybe I could order a sixth or something like that, you know, dead and just technological. Or yeah, and the dead one could have never had life on it, but there's another dead one where there were, there's living, there are artifacts on it that were alive on technology. Hold on. I have to stop you. I have to stop you.

Because this is just something that you just talk about at your paper bag lunches at the university. You just very casually informed us that there is a planet that you can imagine that had life and sophisticated technology.

And we might discover this planet and there's no, I don't want to say nobody there because I don't know if they were buddies. I don't know what it was. But you're saying we may find a planet that has evidence that something lived there and there's technology there. Yeah. Is it made of carbon? I don't know. I haven't been yet. Okay. But okay, I'm going to ask you a super basic question.

Why do you believe that there are planets with technology? Like, that's even, like, for many of us, that's even a leap. Sure. I mean, I agree. It's a massive leap. But here's the thing. If selection is as common as gravity, gravity is really good at making starts.

So I think selection... So I'm just extrapolating wildly. And let's suppose that selection is a force in the universe, force of existence, right? And it happens everywhere. The way you look for this, you say, oh, what I need to do is I need to look for what is the zone in which I need to look for? I obviously...

I can help us narrow it down where the planets need to be, how much energy needs to be nearby and stuff like that. So I think we can push into that. But sure, there will be planets in the universe that are dead and just old technologies on them. Maybe, you know, we're lucky if a star nearby goes supernova, it could get rid of all biology on the planet.

Well, OK, so this I mean, it's kind of crazy that we're talking about this, but you're the most sophisticated person I've ever gotten to ask this question. What if when we talk about life on other planets, right?

we don't even have the equipment right now with which to see that life. Now, a lot of people say, I'm experiencing things, I'm witnessing things, I believe that I'm being visited by entities or I'm seeing flying saucers. Like, are those the same things to you? Or, you know, when people are like, oh, well, nothing could travel that fast. You know, we know that things have to travel at the speed of light, right? Right.

What if that entire framework has to be sort of, I don't want to say thrown in the garbage, but turned upside down to say the method of observation is what actually needs to evolve for us to be able to detect life on other planets?

That statement is correct. The method of observation has to evolve to detect life on other planets. I'm not sure I would go so far to say we're being visited right now. I don't think I have a lot of reasons why we're not not just like, oh, I'm a materialist and I don't believe it. I've got a lot of other reasons. Why aren't we being visited now? Why isn't that a probable explanation of there's life in other planets and we know it because they're probing people's anuses?

Always to the anuses with you. Because it's a fantastic story. So I think the biggest problem is space is just so damn big. That's the problem. I think...

So there is a real, the answer to the Fermi paradox is a bit like when you're a little seed, I think we're thinking about the universe entirely wrong, but this is probably an entirely new podcast one day about it. Because I think like, I think that our universe we have created in our own common space on earth is bigger than the rest of the universe actually in some regard. And so we're kind of thinking about space and time in the wrong way.

The sad part of me makes me think that because we're so far away and our causal cone, we'll call it, right? Sarah calls it, my collaborator Sarah Walker calls it a causal cone. I might call it an assembly space. That is when you plant that seed of complexity in it, or that process of selection that produces objects that become more complex, they all share a common lineage, a kind of history, so they can basically build technology.

as you go up and up and up that combinatorial space, you just get weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder. And probably you're far away while that's happening. You're moving in space. So the space is expanding. So you need time to do it and you're expanding and it gets weirder. So it's going to be hard for you to see it. That's what the Fermi paradox is really the wrong way around. It's like we don't know what to look for and we're getting quite far away. So it's quite hard.

But, you know, there might be other reasons as well. But I'll pause there for a moment just for you to kind of... Let's say that we're going to use our current methods of observation. OK, let's just let's just say that's all I've got. Right. And that even has shifted in the last...

50 years, 100 years, I can see things, right, in other wavelengths that are not necessarily, like I can detect things. Even the placement of particles, right? Our sophistication in understanding that has even shifted since the, you know, the 20s and the 30s, right? So we can sort of understand a little bit more about where things are. Let's say I've only got these eyes and the technology that we have.

Is it possible that with that lens, we could see life that is not carbon-based? And if so, what would that look like? Like, I want to know, where does your fantasy chemistry brain go when I say to you, okay, it's not carbon-based. Let's take away all the carbon-based concepts. What is it? What does it look like? Like, is it, do they have legs and eyes? Like, what should I be thinking about?

Or can I not even imagine it in the same way that those of us who are scientists of faith believe that I can't even understand the origin, right, of any of this conversation? Is it that we can't imagine it? I think that's almost certain, but I've got a hack for you. So yeah, I think you're not going to be able to imagine the morphology, if you like. But I was talking to the guy who does Mythbusters. Is it Adam Savage? I told him my theory and he's like, ah, yeah.

So you're telling me that life does complex shit at scale. And I was like, that's a good way of putting it. So what I mean, I've got this theory I'll tell you about. But what the theory basically says is like, if you find it's called assembly theory that I've developed with over a few teams now, it seems to be lots of people are doing it, even though it's completely made up, not correct. And I'm just overblowing it.

Which is just like, yeah, sure. Okay. No, but be serious for a second. So assembly theory basically would allow you, I can tell you about it, but the punchline is if you look with your telescope and you see complicated things that have a large number of them, the larger the number of complicated things,

the more likely it is that life or technology is produced though. So good examples like if you went to Mars and you found an iPhone, you'd be like, that's a bit weird. Then you find two and then you find 10 and then you find a hundred. You're like, holy cow, someone, life is here.

Similarly, if you went and found a complex molecule, right, or lots of identical cells. So really what you can do is you can get away from the, does it walk? Does it talk? Does it have two eyes? Does it have gray hair? Does it have amino acids? Does it have whatever feature? You say, does it have number one, complexity? We have to define that rigorously. I had to make a new definition. And are there lots of copies?

So that means that I'm looking at something, though, that clearly evolved after us, obviously, because in theory, if we think about complexity the way I believe you do, we would go from less complex to more complex, us being, quote, more complex than what I would be looking at. So the important question I have for you is,

What could that look like for things that have existed millions of years before us? Because why do I think I'm first unless I'm coming from, you know, a theological right perspective of like we were placed here and we're special? But let's put that aside because it's not necessary, I don't think, for our conversation. But what happened, you know, Robin Hanson, who we had on yesterday.

you know, who loves to talk about these things, he's like, oh, it's most likely that there are alien civilizations millions of years old that have already far surpassed our technological prowess and have figured out ways to escape our observation and likely are domesticating us. They're just watching and waiting for what we blow up next.

So they can either dominate, right, because they're far more sophisticated than we are, or they're gaining some sort of surveillance information. You know, I mean, what I look at at my computer must be fascinating to aliens. But can you talk a little bit about the lack of presumption necessary for this theory that we are the first? Yeah.

Also, Robin explains that they're likely trying to avoid us escaping Earth and going off into the rest of the solar system because there's an inherent risk in that. But we can pause that topic and focus on what Mayim just said. Robin needs to get out more.

If an inorganic chemist is telling you to get out more, you need to get out more. Yeah, no, actually, I shouldn't be cheeky, Robert. I love his ideas. I think he's great. But no, I don't agree with it. But...

One quick correction. I don't think assembly theory says that life just becomes infinitely complicated. Got it. Right. I think that's important. It's a process. There is a minute. It's like, exactly. Like a sun is not infinitely hot. You just need enough to break down and cause fusion. Okay. Got it. So there needs to be enough sophistication so you can bring raw material in and energy and have

Darwinian evolution. And actually, you do have complexity at lots of scales. I mean, like, we have memes now, like, right? Human evolution are people on Twitter and Truth Social throwing, basically slagging each other off, right?

I mean, it's, but then look, you think about it. The origin of life has allowed us to produce a mean machine where we basically told each other we're lying on a, on a, you know, on a global scale. And actually that's what's happening. That's in our technology enabled by that technology. It's absolutely fascinating. So I think there is, there is a lot of,

complexity and that you go from let me all go the way back because you haven't just got the origin of life problems you got the origin of life problem then you start to get multicellularity and then you start to get kind of you know plants and animals and fungi and whatnot right and then you get this transition to um

animals that can build sensors and they can see the environment. And first of all, they have to just react quickly. So there's no real what I call reasoning. They just have to react instinctually. So instinct is something that's produced on a long time scale where genetics is evolved. But then actually, then you have to get to instantaneous decision making and then language and intelligence and all this stuff. There's so many layers in your technology and the artifacts that

that there's a lot we can dig into. Okay, you corrected me about complexity, but it was on the, and I want to return to this in a second because I want to ask you about the next evolution of our kind of conscious experience. But I want you to take me to why would we assume that we're,

the fountainhead of the evolutionary process at all? And what does it look like or what does it feel like to imagine that we are not the first, we could be millions and millions of years beyond other evolution? Yeah, okay, no, I think that's entirely possible. I could say that, you know, and I could say that intelligence may have taken a long time to emerge on Earth simply because we had to master oxygen fixation. And

And if the planet had been a different density and different amounts of oxygen and so on, we might not have needed to keep randomly playing around with photosynthesis and then working out how we can increase our energy density. And our IQ, our time-averaged IQ as a planetary species may have been a lot higher

I mean, it took us billions of years to get here. That was one dumb planet for a really long time. So, you know, so I think you're entirely right. There's no reason why we should assume we are the Fountainhead, except for the following. You think about it, you've got origin of the universe. Then you've got first sun, first stars. Then you've got your first galaxies, etc.

Stars explode. Stars explode and produce material. Material forms planets. Planets then allows you to then start origin of life. So you have got a fundamental time limit, like how long does it take for the first star to form? How long does it then take for that star to explode and then to form another planet around another star?

So you have, there is a few billion years, right? And where are we? 13.7 billion years. So how much quicker could life have emerged on in our universe is a very interesting question. Could have happened faster. And from that point of view, I mean, Robert is right, I would say. I mean, some people would say intelligence still hasn't fully evolved on this planet. Maybe we need more oxygen.

We're going to hit pause here. There's so much more to talk about with Dr. Cronin. So we're going to pause here. We're going to release part two, which will include assembly theory, which is what his laboratory focuses on, as well as the other incredible research and amazing things that he is working on in his lab. We're also going to talk about consciousness and what does he think about love and more spiritual components of the intuitive process, the creative process, the

Please stay tuned for episode two with Dr. Lee Cronin. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you follow anywhere you get podcasts to make sure that you are notified of episode two and come join the breaker community, the growing breaker community on Substack. It is our platform where we release never before seen footage, have deep conversations with Mayim and Jonathan and special guests like

that you can't see anywhere else. We hope to see you over on Substack, and we can't wait for you to hear part two of our interview with Dr. Lee Cronin. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD. And now she's gonna break down. It's a breakdown. She's gonna break it down.