Sara Imari Walker — The Physics of Life’s Emergence

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like.

In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is. This is an urgent issue for efforts to make life from scratch in laboratories here on Earth and missions searching for life on other planets.

Walker proposes a new paradigm for understanding what physics encompasses and what we recognize as life. She invites us into a world of maverick scientists working without a map, seeking not just answers but better ways to formulate the biggest questions we have about the universe. The book culminates with the bold proposal of a new theory for identifying and classifying life, one that applies not just to biological life on Earth but to any instance of life in the universe. Rigorous, accessible, and vital, Life as No One Knows It celebrates the mystery of life and the explanatory power of physics.

Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and discovering alien life on other worlds. She is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early-Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental theory for understanding what life is. Her research has been featured in Scientific American, Quanta Magazine, and a variety of other international outlets.

Shermer and Walker discuss:

• Defining life
• Defining the self
• Defining the individual organism
• Materialism, vitalism, idealism, and Platonic ideas
• Where are the laws of nature?
• Is the universe mathematical?
• Why we need a paradigm shift in origins of life research
• Assembly theory and what it predicts
• Phase transitions in the origin and evolution of life
• The hard problem of consciousness
• Free will, volition, combatibilism, determinism
• What’s wrong with current definitions of life, self, and individual?
• Possible theories for how life originated on Earth
• Symbiogenesis: from Procaryote to Eucaryote cells
• Searching for biosignatures on exoplanets
• Dyson spheres and other technosignatures
• Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project
• What might aliens be like?
• Kardashev scale of civilizations
• Deities for Atheists, Skygods for Skeptics: aliens as gods and the search as religion.

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