Lex Fridman
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022
4:05:51 · 1.1M views · Mar 11, 2022
Lex Fridman interviews University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin about the origin of life, aliens, complexity and consciousness. The conversation centers on Cronin's assembly theory.
HN points to it in origin-of-life and complexity threads as a fascinating long-form introduction to assembly theory.
5 comments from Hacker News
I highly recommend the Lex Fridman podcast with Lee Cronin (#269), about the origins of life and complexity theory [1]. The discussion is really incredible. It really changed my naive perspective of life, and the universe. 1. this video
There’s a great Lex Fridman podcast related to this, about “Assembly Theory”, by Lee Cronin. I thought it was fascinating. Youtube: this video Spotify: [LINK]
On the topic of complexity of life created structures, I found this Lex Fridman's interview with Lee Cronin fascinating and thought-provoking: this video
> A total of 23 types of amino acids were found in asteroid samples brought back by Japan's Hayabusa2 space probe, according to new studies published in the journal Science and elsewhere, shedding further light on the origins of life on Earth. This intersects with a raging debate in Origins of Life research. The Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated the production of amino acids from simple gasses thought the be present in the early Earth atmosphere and energy. The problem is that you can add amino acids into a flask, stir, and not much will happen. You can pump in all the energy you want and all you'll get it tar. Before you can even start to make proteins, which is what makes life, you need enzymes. The trouble with enzymes is that they're, well, proteins. So how do you get the proteins that make proteins in the first place? One line of investigation says that you don't. What happens instead are stepping-stone chemical processes that turn energy from the environment into self-reinforcing cycles that build complex molecules. Over time chemical evolution takes place to produce self-reinforcing systems that make something that's very close to amino acids and/or proteins. We don't know what these processes are, but we can deduce their necessity given the above conundrum. Chemical evolution is a process we observe on the macro scale when, for example, viruses evade vaccine defenses. In other words, finding amino acids just says that the processes that produce amino acids are ubiqu
This was recently discussed in an interview with Lee Cronin on the Lex Fridman podcast [1]. The idea is that using only mass spectroscopy and a (hard to compute, but not impossible) look-up table, one can determine with vanishingly low uncertainty whether a complex molecule came from a biotic or abiotic process. This has implications for the detection of life on other planets. [1] this video