George Church: belief

Transcript context

…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? These are very challenging problems. I'm not even sure we would be able to say within five orders of magnitude, much less 50%. I think it's more likely to come from exploration than it is going to be from simulation. The sad truth is that almost none of the missions that we've sent outside of Earth have actually looked for life. They've had components that could have looked for life. A sad number of those had not enough components that could look for life. The ones that could look for life were not really looking for it. When we get positive results, we dismiss them as happened with Pioneer. I think if we just start looking at the geysers that are coming out of various moons of Jupiter and Saturn, there's so much water. There's 50 times more water, liquid water, not frozen but liquid water, in our solar system than on Earth. Doesn't that seem likely that some of that would have been a good breeding ground? It could be that we need sunny shores where you have a lot of dry land right next to water. Maybe these are just giant oceans that are surrounded by ice and maybe that's not an ideal. In any case, we need to look at those fountains to see what's popping up. That's a high priority. The same thing goes for water on Mars. That's maybe even more accessible. But until we've exhausted those, those are probably the easiest. They're hard. We’re still talking about multibillion dollar experiments, but I think they're a little more convincing. Again, it'll be hard to prove the negative. If we find this negative on everything in the solar system, there's so much more diversity out there that could have done it. If in a thousand years we're still using DNA and RNA and proteins for top-end manufacturing, the frontiers of engineering, how surprised would you be? Would you think, “Oh, that makes sense. Evolution designed these systems for billions of years.” Or would you think, “Oh, it's surprising that these ended up being the systems. Whatever evolution found just happened to be the best way to manufacture or to store information”?…

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