What Will Alien Life Look Like? - Lee Cronin - #518

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. welcome back to the show. My guest today is Lee Cronin. He's the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Head of the Cronin Group Lab and CEO of Chemify. The job of deciding what life is, how it originates and the different forms it might take, sounds like a task for UFO theorists, but it's actually in the realm of chemists like Lee. This means that some of the biggest questions humanity has rests on his lab's shoulders. Expect to learn why Lee believes that there is life everywhere in the universe, his theory on the origin of life here on Earth, why we haven't seen any aliens yet, whether Robin Hanson's great filter hypothesis is true, what common traits all types of life will have, the most exotic types of life forms Lee has imagined and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lee Cronin.
Am I right in thinking that you're in scotland now?

**Lee Cronin** (1:15)
Yep, I'm in Glasgow.

**Chris Williamson** (1:16)
Given the fact that we might be talking a lot about adaptation in this conversation, how have you adapted to understanding the accents of everybody that's around you in Glasgow? Did that take time?

**Lee Cronin** (1:28)
I'm still struggling. I think the thing that I'm getting better at though is being water repellent.

**Chris Williamson** (1:33)
Ah.

**Lee Cronin** (1:34)
Because it's so rainy.

**Chris Williamson** (1:36)
Yes, well, as someone that's from the Northeast of England, I feel your pain. Yeah, it's a strange climate up there. What does life is the universe developing a memory mean?

**Lee Cronin** (1:53)
I'm not sure I know now. It seemed like a good phrase at the time. No, I think it's the simplest way I can describe the process by soulless matter or stuff that's not directed is able literally to act on other stuff by experiencing stuff in stuff. Now, that sounds a bit weird, but I can unpack that because it's interesting in that I think that I realized in the last few months that there is this transition from sand, if you like, all the way to cells but actually via functional objects. If you think of sand on the beach and the sand has no memory, so the wind is blowing around and maybe water is coming in. But maybe every now and then some clumps of sand, maybe that some clumps of sand get blown together in a triangle, and they become resistant to weathering from either side. That triangle is able to remain, exist for time, and if that triangle can have a material effect on other sand next door and that carries on, you can see maybe how the triangle could literally make lots of triangles. And so that in a way is like a little rudimentary memory because the effect of that chance arrangement has a material influence on the future. And so it's those little things that occur in the universe able to then remember that by physically building things, I think what I mean.
As opposed to say, I don't know, you know, if you've got a flame and you burn things, you lose, the material that came before is destroyed and no longer exists. So it has a harder time to have an influence on the future. And I suppose it's literally meaning that the past has an effect on the future because of the state of the past, like what the shape of the object is. So that's really what I mean is that the past really does have a meaning, which is obvious probably to us, but not to physicists who basically think the past doesn't exist.

**Chris Williamson** (4:06)
I learned about slime molds a couple of weeks ago. And they, I'm aware that they were jumping ahead and we're getting into something that is definitely life, but they kind of have a memory thing, right? They leave hormones or they secrete pheromones and leave them around. And then when they go back, they can know not to go to this particular place. This is a mold.

**Lee Cronin** (4:26)
Yep.

**Chris Williamson** (4:26)
And they can train them to go through mazes and shit.

**Lee Cronin** (4:31)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, slime molds are really good at doing that. Bacteria are able to communicate by that. So it's all this kind of this idea, this constraints, because the thing about the problem with life, the difference between life and non-life, you know when you've got life like a slime mold or sand, right? Someone said, here's some sand, here's some slime mold. Can you tell the difference? Most people would be able to tell the difference. But that's that that jump that you need to go through to get from sand to slime mold that people really had trouble with. And I think this understanding that the universe is kind of, life is the process by which the universe not only has memories, but starts to initiate the process of recording those memories and making them more and more sophisticated so we're able to go to abstraction. So the going from sand to super intelligence is actually a fairly obvious thing that should happen in the universe believe it or not.