Michael Levin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you think all the tooling that we develop and the mapping that we’ve been discussing will help us do the study part, finding aliens out there? I think it’s essential. I think it’s essential. We are so parochial in what we expect to find in terms of life that we are going to be just completely missing a lot of stuff. If we can’t even agree on, never mind, definitions of life, but what’s actually important… I, I read a paper recently where I asked whatever, 65 or so modern working scientists for a definition of life. And we had so many different definitions across so many different dimensions. We had to use AI to make amorphous space out of it. And there was zero consensus about what actually is important, you know? And if we’re not good at recognizing it here, I just don’t see how we’re going to be good at recognizing it somewhere else. So given how miraculous life is here on Earth, it’s clear to me that we have so much more work to do. That said, would that be exciting to you if we find life on other planets in the solar system? Like, what would you do with that information, or is that just another life form that we don’t understand?…

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