How did life originate on Earth? | Paul Rosolie and Lex Fridman

just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions as we were talking about aliens there's uh a lot of people trying to understand trying to study the origin of life oh I love this first of all what do you think is life versus non-life like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest simplest of organisms we saw a frog in the Stream yesterday that was like a leaf frog it was like as flat as a sheet of paper and it does a lot of weird things and it found a way to exist in this world but that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it but like there's a life form that exists in this world what is the difference between that and a rock what what is like what is the essence of that life this might be an unanswerable question there's probably a chemistry physics biology way of answering that like what to you is that I I I think to me Li life is something that grows and responds to stimuli like in basic biology 101 I think and I'm fine with that I don't need it to be more romantic than that but I think it's actually comical how how do you get from a rock to an orangutan mhm you know and and our answer for that is primordial soup maybe there was just stuff on Earth and then the the the the stuff just got up and started walking maybe there just there was nothing happening and then there was all of a sudden there was a cell mhm and the cell had function and then it complexified and then it started reproducing and found male and female parts and and what like it we are so un underere equipped to understand how the hell we got here let alone ants or or or even bacteria I see this so many uh in very simple mathematical models like something called Game of Life their cell automa you could see from simple rules and simple objects when they're interacting together as you grow that system complex objects arise like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science by mathematics at all and it seems like from primordial soups you can get a lot of cool and the force of getting from to like two humans on microphones yeah uh not understood and it seems to be a thing that happens on Earth I tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in the universe and there's some deep Force that's pushing this along in some way that there's something we uh I don't want to sort of uh simplify it but there is something that creates complexity out of Simplicity that we don't quite understand uh and that's the thing that created the first organism living organism on Earth that like leap from no life to life on Earth that's a weird one that's a weird one because you can imagine I think that what the Earth is four 4.5 billion years old and you can imagine just this this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and ele and iron and granite and like just random stuff it's pretty easy to imagine that but then I remember that book that I think we all have the same book when we were kids and then like they show this like fish-like animal crawling out of a out of the primordial soup and it's like bro you just missed the most important part author of that book bro and and I think the first bacteria came in around three three 3 point 7 billion years ago so there's like at least like you know a bunch of billion years where there was just nothing there was just a planet and then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria and the bacteria stuck around for for a long time a billion two billion years it's just very very long just bacteria just bacteria but a lot of them a lot of them there's probably a lot of innovation a lot of murder a lot of interaction yeah yeah and then I mean there's there's a big a few big leaps along the history of life on Earth yeah you know the Predator prey Dynamic that was a really cool Innovation it's almost like Innovations like features on an iPhone it's like it's nice like uh Predator prey uh UK carats so complex multicellular organisms uh emerging from the water to land that was weird that was a that a interesting Innovation there how whatever led to humans that there's a lot of interesting stuff there I see I can't even get that far I can't get from Rock and Sand to cells yeah that's that's a huge I mean I mean to everything around us that has cells it's just it's it's wild even and I I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be this this it's impossible to replicate it I'm looking at it through the candle light right now I can see all of the structures in this Leaf the incredible structures in this leaf that look exactly like the veins in my arm which look exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this landscape and it's like life has this this overwhelming pattern that it uses and it's so beautiful I just I just think it's yeah when when you imagine the the the the days of the lightning and the volcanoes and the primordial soup it's it's there's a there's a big gap mhm there and it's it's fascinating to think about and it's fascinating to see how different people's belief systems uh lead them to different answers there not to give any spoilers but postcard from Earth Darren aronowski film the idea there is it's there's probes that are sent out from Earth to all these other planets and each probe contains two humans a man and a woman uhhuh and those two humans are in love so think of a couple in love they're sent there with all the information basically a leaf that holds the information what it takes to create life on other plan to recreate on Earth on other planets and the two humans hold all the information for the things that make life on Earth special especially in human civilization is love Consciousness the the social connection so all that information is sent in the probe and the postcard from Earth is uh those humans waking up remembering all the information that is Earth that wow like a celebration of all the things that make earth magical throughout its history all the diversity of organisms all of that you're loading all that in to create life on that new planet which is something I think alien civilizations are doing they're sending probes all throughout the Galaxy and they just haven't arrived yet but anyway that's another uh that's so beautiful and one of the things that I I think I all I I want to see that so much and one of the things that I love about aronowski work is is the Fountain and what I find so beautiful about that is that now here he's saying okay we're sending probes out to other worlds alien civilizations and in the fountain it was sort of what I thought he did so beautifully was braid together those three stories where in one I don't remember if he's in a spaceship or if that's supposed to be like his soul the other one he's a scientist and sort of like comparable times to hours and then he's the the the Spanish explorer but either way there's the tree of life and it sort of braids together all of the major religions and it made me think of that quote that you hear where it says you know oh God what was it um Christ wasn't a Christian and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't a Muslim they were all just teachers who were teaching love and it's like the fountain The Fountain sort of says nature is the that driving force and it's our job to understand that the game is love and that's what that's what the main character in the fountain needs to learn is that it's that it's nature that's going to just that's going to carry your soul through this this this thing and that there's so much you don't understand and the Epiphany at the end God I love that movie God I love that among many things you're also an artist is trying to convert the thing that is nature into a thing that we humans can understand the complexity the beauty of it that's what Darren ornowski tried to do with those couple of films that's something that I hope you do actually in the medium of film too that would be very interesting and you do that in the medium of books currently um how much do you think we understand about the history of life on Earth I think we got it all wrong no I don't know it seems like they change it all the time you know they say they say that Easter Island you know when I was in college they were big on telling you that Easter Island they ruined their environment and uh they had environmental collapse and that's why there was nobody on Easter Island it was a cautionary tale we could ruin our environment and now it seems like they've changed their mind on that and then when humans enter North America seems to be hugely up to speculation and you know the the Africa spreading that we all spread out of Africa and then the pine Overkill Extinction Theory and it's like it seems like every few years they update it and they change it and they say oh the guys no no no no no the guys from 10 years ago actually my new theory is the best theory let's write some books and get me on Letterman and it seems like there's a new prevailing Theory that's really always exciting and edgy about how how we got here and where we came from and how we just first and maybe even has some political implications like how we should use the Amazon moving forward like the Amazon was engineered by people so it let's just cut it down yeah it's I tend to believe that we mostly don't understand anything but there is an optimism in continuously figuring out the puzzle of that we offline talked about the the Graham Hancock Fint Dibble debate uh on on Rogan I like debates personally so fln dble represents mainstream archaeology and I actually like the whole science the whole field of archaeology you're trying to figure out history with so little information you're trying to put together this this this puzzle when you have so little and you're desperately Clinging On to little Clues and from those Clues using the simple possible explanation to understand and now with modern uh technology as as Flint was trying to express that you can use large amounts of data that's like imperfect but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations their different practices from the little details of uh what kind of things they eat how they interact with each other what kind of art they create to when they existed what are the time frames all that kind of stuff and that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding but still the Arab bars are large in terms of what really happened and that leaves room for things that Graham Hancock talks about like lost civilizations which I like also because it gives you have um a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we got completely wrong and that's always good to like remember it's confusing to me to imagine like what I I don't even know what like what ended the what where did the Egyptians go like what happened to seemed like they were doing so good they had so much cool um but I mean I was reading anthropological stuff in the Amazon about about tribes that you know just through through their societal structures and through their hunting practices that that didn't really develop practices that worked and kind of bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger societies and and there's there's a lot of people that got it wrong you know for every explorer that that that that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America there's probably hundred hundreds more that just die at se get eaten by shark you know Avalanche and it's just it's so fascinating to me that we all of us really past our grandparents don't really even know where we came from like do you know who your great great great grandparents are like no I mean there there's methods of try to figure that out but really again the air bars are so large that it's almost like we trying to create a narrative that Mak sense for us you know that I'm I'm 10% Neanderthal therefore I can bench press this much and uh therefore my aggressive tendency have a explanation when in reality there's so much diversity of personalities that they they uh far overshadow any possible histories we might have your aggressive tendencies don't have any explanation you no you need to you listen to me right now I'm sorry don't hit me again don't choke me out again for

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 40,286

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, paul rosolie, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: KAYqX2CDAwo

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2024