George Church: prediction

Transcript context

…What discovery in biology—so not in astronomy or some other field—would make you convinced that life on Earth is the only life in the galaxy? Conversely, what might convince you that no, it must have arisen independently thousands of times in this galaxy? Oh, I see what you're getting at. Astronomy might be that we would detect radio signals or light signals. With biology, the kind of evidence would be that you show in a laboratory using prebiotic conditions a really simple way to get life. It's harder to prove the negative because we don't know all the possible prebiotic conditions. Probably the number was vast. You have 10^20 liters of water at various different salinities and drying up on the ocean and the sun and the lightning and all this stuff. I think if you showed, reconstructed in the lab, a very simple pathway from inorganics, cyanide derivatives and reduced compounds, all the way up to some cellular replicating structure, that might lead us to believe that at least life exists. Now that there are other parts of the Drake equation that might kick in. Maybe it's hard to get intelligent life because intelligence isn't necessarily in your best interest. And if you get intelligence life, it's hard to maintain that without societal collapse or without robotics taking over and then killing themselves. That's hard to do experiments on. But to your question, an experiment that showed maybe multiple different ways of getting to a living system from non-living systems spontaneously would be interesting. Again, I'm not sure. It'd be very hard to prove the negative. Between intelligent life and some sort of primordial RNA thing, what is the step at which, if there is any, you say there's a less than 50% chance something like at this level exists elsewhere in the Milky Way?…

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