Janna Levin: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. What do you think is the hardest thing on the chain of leaps, that got the humans? I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed. And if it’s energetically favorable, it’s going to take off. It’s really just, and that’s why I also think that going from inanimate, to animate, is probably gray. Like the transition is gray. At what point we call something fully alive. Famously, it’s hard to make a nice list of bullet points that need to be met in order to declare something alive. Is a virus alive? I mean, I don’t know. Is a prion alive? They seem to do some things, but they kind of rely on stealing other DNA and replicating and I don’t know. I guess they’re not alive. But I mean the point is that it really, at the end of the day, I really think it’s just you asked if it’s just physics. I mean I think it’s just these rules of energetics. And the gray area between the non-living and the living, is way simpler just on earth. And you said it’s already complicated on earth, but it’s probably even more complicated elsewhere, where the chemistry could be anything.…

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