Lee Cronin: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. What about, if I show up to a new planet, we’ll go to Mars or some other planet from a different solar system, how do we use assembly index there to discover alien life? Very simply, actually. Let’s say we’ll go to Mars with a mass spectrometer, with a sufficiently high resolution, so what you have to be able to do, so a good thing about mass spec is that you can select the molecule from the mass, and then if it’s high enough resolution, you can be more and more sure that you’re just seeing identical copies. You can count them. And then you fragment them and you count the number of fragments, and look at the molecular weight. And the higher the molecular weight and the higher the number of the fragments, the higher the assembly index. So if you go to Mars and you take a mass spec, with high enough resolution, and you can find molecules, a guide on earth, if you could find molecules, say, greater than 350 molecular weight, with more than 15 fragments, you have found artifacts that can only be produced, at least on earth, by life. And now you would say, “Oh, well, maybe the geological process. ” I would argue very virulently that that is not the case. But we can say, “Look, if you don’t like the cutoff on earth, go up higher, 30, 100, because there’s going to be a point where you can find a molecule with so many different parts, the chances of you getting a molecule that has a hundred different parts and finding a million identical copies, that’s just impossible. That could never happen in an infinite set of universes. Can you just linger on this copy number thing? A million different copies, what do you mean by copies and why is the number of copies important?…

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