Yesterday, I had a fascinating conversation with the brilliant synthetic biologist, George Church. This rare interdisciplinary dialogue was recorded for a new podcast series coordinated by Rick Coyle, founder of Accelerator Media, a U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring curiosity and the pursuit of lifelong learning through educational media. The format of this new podcast brings together two experts from different fields for a non-hosted conversation about topics that connect or intrigue both participants. The episode should air publicly by the end of January 2025.
George and I discussed life in the cosmos all the way from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, and to the distant future. The chemistry of life-as-we-know-it could have started shortly after the first stars formed, about 100 million years after the Big Bang, in regions enriched with heavy elements by the first exploding stars. If what we find on Earth is representative, it would have taken billions of years for a complex multicellular form of life to emerge from a soup of chemicals, explaining why we exist so late in cosmic history.
Life on Earth could have had its roots on Mars, which cooled earlier than Earth because of its smaller size. The heavy bombardment of Mars could have lifted rocks that reached Earth carrying tiny astronauts in the form of Martian microbes, 4.2 billion years before Elon Musk wished to send human astronauts to Mars.
If mirror life was delivered to Earth from outside, it was suppressed by terrestrial life and did not have a major impact. Aliens might be among us but we do not notice them. This reminded me of the unjustified concerns about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN producing mini black holes that might consume Earth. Cosmic-rays routinely impact hadrons in the Earth’s atmosphere with larger center-of-mass energies and did not trigger any catastrophe over the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence.
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