Adam Frank: evaluation

Transcript context

…So, to me, at least, the big question is FE, which is basically a biogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate in a planet? Because all the other ones seem very likely, everything seems very likely. The only open question to me is how hard is it for life to originate? There’s lots of ways to, again, we don’t know unless we look, and you had Sarah Walker around not too long ago, she’s very interested in origins of life. So, lots of people are working on this. But I think it’s hard looking at the history of the Earth, and again, you can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, forming life I don’t think is hard. Getting basic biology started, I don’t think is hard. It’s still wild, it’s an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn’t. That’s one of the things I like about Sarah’s work, we’re pursuing on a different level about life as the only system that uses information. But still, regardless of all those kinds of details, life is probably easy to make. That’s my gut feeling. Day by day, this changes for me, but I just see that once you create bacteria, it is off to the races. You’re going to get complex life as long as you have enough time. That boring billion, but I just can’t imagine a habitable planet not having a couple of billion to spare.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.