What The Hell Is Life? And How Do We Search For It?

[@fritzelly7309]

This has been one of my most favourite interviews you've done - absolutely riveting interview

[@HE-pu3nt]

🎶 It's life Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it. 🎶 It's life Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, It's not as we know it Jim. 🎶 Star Trekking across the universe, only going forward 'cos we can't find reverse. 😂🤣🥳🍾🥂🍷🥴🇬🇧♥️ Merry Christmas folks.

[@BIGREDDOG09]

Listening to people talk about things I don't yet understand has been the pillar of my learning since my 20's so I refuse to feel stupid right now. :)

[@infinitemonkey917]

I found this easy to follow. Try PBS Spacetime if you don't mind feeling stupid.

[@urduib]

It´s never stupid trying to learn complex things. You are here for knowledge, and that makes you awesome in my eye´s 🎄

[@mattwuk]

When you can just watch a man speak and know he's brilliant, here we are with Dr Chris Impey

[@mattwuk]

Would I like to meet him and have a conversation? Nope, I'm not informed enough, but I love listening to this I'm just a regular nerd, props to Fraser for having a conversation for us.

[@trignals]

@16:31 such a charismatic interviewee 😂. Maybe it's a regional accent in the US but there's a definitive Mathew McConaughey vibe. Also great input on an excellent topic. A late contender for the most enjoyable interview of the year so far!

[@jackd42o]

"..my liver cells are not very robust" You're tellin me brother

[@JohnMcGuire-y4b]

Great episode, and what a wonderfully understated and wise man Chris Impey is.

[@billionsandbillionsofstars]

Thank you Fraser for asking my question.❤

[@ulfpe]

One thing, regardless of chemistry is time. We have a certan life span that decides our way of life, travel through space and communicate. A life form with a different life span and even structure could behave very differently and we might not know what we are lokking at

[@Dam-a-fence]

18:44. I think this feeling I'm feeling right now is what I feel when moments like this happen. I'm no specialist and that makes me ever so happy. Talking about what came first, the chicken or the egg. For all intents and purposes. Everything came first, then it segmented. Seeking to comprehend the total, as one of the parts, is folly. You never will. Why seek to? Right now is what matters, you physicists should be able to parse the matter from that pun. Tomorrow's a mystery and today is a gift. Take it. Don't use it to wax philosophical about what came after light separated everything. That's a waste of time which no one, including everything, is making more of.

[@Sq7Arno]

Life is the universe playing with itself.

[@deltalima6703]

If it moves its life. -my cat

[@samedwards6683]

Thanks so much for creating and sharing this informative interview. Great job. Keep it up.

[@virutech32]

33:04 I think this is a silky take cuz even if you aren't consuming energy at a fast pace(ignoring population growth entirely) you would still grow by harvesting resources for storage. If you use less energy than the sun provides then you still build a dyson swarm to disassemble the sun via starlifting to a point where its power output matches your consumption. Regardless of how efficient you are the sun(and all the other stars) will keep uselessly wasting energy into the void

[@njm3211]

This was an amazing interview. For me, it was the most interesting ever. Dr. Impey is a brilliant scientist.

[@douglaswilkinson5700]

Dr. Angela Collier's has a video about "why life will never be silicon based." She compares carbon & silicon the atomic level, how they form bonds, how they differ, etc. It's well worth a look.

[@HansMilling]

Great interview, this is an interesting discussion and the day we find life in the universe and are also sure it didn’t originate from Earth, will change the earth forever. The likelihood of this happening is however very, very slim in my opinion. The chance that life within reach of telescopes evolved two places at the relative same timespan is so infinitesimal that I don’t think we will be that lucky.

[@virutech32]

28:25 They would not need rockets to get off their planet. Launch Loops can work on just about any gravity planet and there's nothing stopping us from from sensing high-grav construction robots.

[@anthonyalfredyorke1621]

Thanks Fraser for another fabulous interview, have a wonderful Christmas and New year peace and love to your family. PEACE AND LOVE TO EVERYONE AND HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL ❤❤.

[@mattwuk]

To test for life 'conservatively' is proper, we are just starting out. It's the only life we know.

[@ericv738]

Loved this convo! Thanks y'all 🙏

[@muleskinnerfilms6719]

Excellent as always

[@spacekiwikit]

What if each one of us, increases order in some way thus decreasing our local entropy, would we be creating a techno signature? Or a potential for life to profit of it? Is each local decrease in entropy automatically a form of consumable energy? Which leads to the ultimate question: who benefits if I clean my room?

[@galaxia4709]

I have 1 place to watch videos and I'm not going to all kind of places in different directions to watch a video. Your new people do great work for you but that doesn't mean they're right with every proposal they do and this is just an old commercial manipulation while you don't need that and can just say come join are great community on patreon with people just as curious as you, and more and more people will come (you already have 1000s) but please don't lure people with tricks to patreon while ruining the experience on YT. And also I want to say it's very friendly of you to let people join your patreon for free.

[@hive_indicator318]

All of the videos there are actually hosted on KZbin, to my knowledge. Patreon definitely doesn't do video hosting

[@freedonnadd71]

Thanks Fraser! So Fascinating! No you have me wanting to go play No Mans Sky again LOL😊

[@StudlyMcDude]

It makes me feel even more special thinking mankind could be the Pinnacle of evolution .

[@Michiganmayor420]

@@StudlyMcDude that scares me if we are :(

[@thedidhedied7975]

Pretty sure thats Crabs 😆. Or maybe octopus, jellyfish, cockroaches, fruit flies or maybe a worm of some kind. I dunno, aren't all current lifeforms the Pinnacle of Evolution just for the mere reason we exist right now? Time will tell which ones go extinct

[@thedidhedied7975]

I bet the true pinnacle turns out to be a bacteria or archaea

[@KeithLeeman]

Great conversation. Thank you

[@jewymchoser]

Amayzing guest!

[@richbrant8534]

I have been thinking about life that could evolve with static electricity. If life could use oxygen to live, I could only imagine some sort of cells that animate and have some sort of thought.

[@charcoal386]

Gravity waves are ling period. Could you put much info on them? How fast do they travel?

[@MrMelonMonkey]

as far as ive understood it from issac arthurs videos, they are travelling at the speed of light. and encoding information on/in them that doesnt get swallowed by noise would require us to move gigantic (truly unfathomable large) masses extraordinarily quickly since we dont have any other means to manipulate spacetime in that way currently. just think about that the "antennae" of the LIGO are really long and we could only read out the final dance of two colliding supermassive blackholes from the noise. so its not really practical from our current standpoint.

[@charcoal386]

@MrMelonMonkey what a great answer. Thank you

[@themacunion105]

water is the solvent of life.

[@10aDowningStreet]

Wonder if the DR's nickname is Chimpey 🤔

[@gustavderkits8433]

Nitrous oxide? Or nitric oxide?

[@Psatas611]

What abut life when you don’t have eyes ??

[@nikolasthomas2910]

Life as we don’t know it is little green guys with big heads

[@Nemesis_69-i9l]

Something that has a cell membrane. *Pops corn*

[@alexsmith2526]

life -let us take FIRE for instance - it grows it eats it reproduces it dies so is fire alive ?also OXYGEN is important as it combines with minerals etc as oxdisation how many oxides exist ??

[@charlespage8112]

Here's some food for the "beast".

[@lolmao500]

Life is suffering

[@alexisdespland4939]

at what speeed dosethe earth rotate howdidwe figure it out when and whodiscovered it how many times faster the the average oder jet is it.

[@BrodieMelts]

Would you say Data from Startreck is life?

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

When you are called "data" you are not life

[@jimmyjames5960]

​@doncarlodivargas5497 good thing he said "Data" 🙄

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

@@jimmyjames5960 - it smells of something artificial from a long distance

[@PetraKann]

Data is actually played by an actor named Brent Spiner. If you remove Brent's make-up and star trek uniform he could easily pass as an ordinary human being walking down the street. Likewise the Enterprise is not a real space ship, it's the product of the props department at Paramount Studios in Hollywood as well as computer graphics animation technology.

[@JamesCairney]

​@@PetraKann are you seriously trying to tell us that Data isn't real! You have shattered my dreams! How will I ever recover from this? I thought star trek was a reality TV from the future! So spot isn't real either? Tell me it isn't so!

[@removechan10298]

life is ontropy

[@TheLastStarfighter77]

I'm pretty sure you meant - Entropy .

[@removechan10298]

@@TheLastStarfighter77 no, ontropy.

[@daverobert7927]

Question - Is there Satellites being designed to fit in SpaceX Starship

[@jacob_90s]

I can't remember where I read it, but one of my favorite definitions is that life is a chemical reaction that does not stop.

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

Ok, we can ask, what the heck is life, but, if it doesn't evolve, it will just be some goo, not very interesting, if we find life we can't eat, it's not very interesting, if that life doesn't eat us we should appreciate it but still not so interesting, life developed in to intelligent beings we can forget, so, the only types of life that will be of interest for us is life similar to what we find here on earth

[@tygical]

bacteria can eat things

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

@tygical - yes, they can eat us, and we can eat them, and they evolve, perhaps they inherit the earth one day so they are very interesting

[@lubricustheslippery5028]

The more common definitions of life is that it evolves or has evolved and have metabolism so it eats. It still an possibility that it could occur in ways we never have though of and in scales so far off from us that we would have an hard time recognize it.

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

@lubricustheslippery5028 - something we do not recognise? So, how do something we do not even recognise as life exist in the first place? And when it comes to intelligent life we must assume it would have qualities close to us and have had a more or less similar history, and a result of evolutionary principles

[@hive_indicator318]

Not interesting to you doesn't mean it's objectively not interesting

[@HendrickHulst]

Another speculative life in the Universe conversation with an astronomer/astrophysicist that is lacking in any biological expertise. Statements like gravitational waves are easily created being made by him with such a lack of accuracy makes me doubt his credibility. Please next time interview someone with experimental expertise in research involving prebiotic chemistry and less digressions into pseudo-economic extraterrestrial theories. Nothing to see here.

[@CJ_Ludwig501]

Constructive positive criticism works much better than being a jerk

[@linkgunther1618]

Sounds like you're looking for a specific point of view, and only listening to the people you want to hear is why the internet, and consequently the world, is so divisive and negative. How about next time you keep an open mind, or just stop watching. The world is lucky to have Fraser; not even someone like Fraser, but Fraser specifically. He has been doing this sort of thing for decades, and if he is taking the time to interview someone, there is something worth hearing.

[@bb5979]

“Im not looking for it so that must mean it isnt there and is unimportant” -mainstream science

[@HendrickHulst]

@@CJ_Ludwig501 Oh touched an adolatrous nerve did I. Get yourself a broad scientific education then go back and listen critically to this ramble.

[@HendrickHulst]

These individuals have every right to speculate on any subject they want but their expertise, if any, is not in biology or any aspect of metabolic pathways or gene function or structure. Might as well get some lawyers or politicians have a similar discussion on the subject manner much as is popular with the masses now a day.@@linkgunther1618

[@stevehansen7895]

The universe is so massive that if intelligent life is nearly impossible, then that brings the number of intelligent civilizations down to around 1 billion.

[@Cornpopjohnson]

First comment. First like.

[@MelindaGreen]

It's interesting that Chris' definition of life specifies that it must be chemical in nature. Given our sample-of-one, it's clear that chemistry is incredibly rich and powerful, but does that mean we shouldn't even consider other possible forms? For example magnetic loops and knots within stars and magnetars. Even restricting ourselves to chemistry, maybe there is life on Earth based on crystal growth that is too slow for us to even recognize as life. We know that life doesn't need to be chemical, because we've already seen it evolve in computer simulations. So I have a new question I hope you will use to challenge future researchers: If you had unlimited resources to search for alien life, but explicitly not chemistry-based, where might you look?

[@BryanM61]

Non-natural organization.

[@CJ_Ludwig501]

How many definitions of life are there? Correct answer: How many biologists are there?

[@daveulmer]

Information and DNA are just carriers of Knowledge. Life requires both Knowledge and Understanding. Understanding always requires energy to operate and is the software that makes life possible.

[@paulwilson6511]

RNA by itself though, can carry out many of the functions that a cell needs. RNA performs the tasks that proteins later took over. So, the RNA which is not that hard to see self-assembling was the main factor in the beginning and then DNA, which is also a natural self-assembling factor from RNA, followed on after. RNA and DNA are just such remarkable molecules that it really has to be backbone of all life everywhere. No other molecules get this big and do anything like DNA and RNA can.

[@roderickbeck8859]

Without economic growth you will not have technological progress. Indeed, technological progress itself almost always results in economic growth. I felt the two participants are simply not very sophisticated regarding these issues. The great civilizations were always periods of economic growth extending from the Classical era of Athens through the Renaissance and Enlightenment up to the Modern Era.

[@robwalker4548]

We don’t know that. This is a view we are telling ourselves about economic growth to justify many actions we do as individuals, businesses and as nations. Longterm our views of economic growth could just be an example of a death spiral that escalates our species into extinction. We have no record of how intelligent life on other worlds might have evolved and developed technologies in a different way than us. I suspect most life that does develop technologies are likely short lived species with very few lasting on long time scales. This too is speculative on my part without information from multiple worlds with intelligent species as proof. In other words if we only believe in the paradigms we create with heuristics we convince ourselves are uniquely universal then our eyes are closed to what is possible.

[@JohnMcGuire-y4b]

Great episode, and what a wonderfully understated and wise man Chris Impey is.