anomalien.com
Is Terrestrial Life a Von Neumann Machine of Extraterrestrial Origin?
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. Our podcast is expected to air on January 16, 2025.
George and I discussed life in the cosmos all the way from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, 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.
I asked George whether there are any local clues that life could have been seeded on Earth by an extraterrestrial gardener? He agreed that this is a viable hypothesis worth exploring since there are some unexplained gaps in our understanding of how complex life emerged on Earth.
Ambitious alien scientists and engineers could have aimed to seed fertile planets like Earth with self-replicating probes. If the “gardeners” were technological platforms with artificial intelligence (AI), surely — their makers would have recognized the great benefits of chemistry in using raw terrestrial materials and turning the local soup of chemicals into self-replicating machines in the form of complex-life-as-we-know-it. In that case, the vision inspired by John von Neumann’s self-replicating machines of extraterrestrial origin is terrestrial life as we know it!
von Neumann proposed his abstract idea in lectures delivered at the University of Illinois in 1948 and 1949, before the discovery of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule. Three decades after von Neumann’s lectures, Freeman Dyson suggested the concept of Astrochicken in his book “Disturbing the Universe.” Dyson imagined a spacecraft weighing a kilogram and representing a mix of biology, microelectronics and artificial intelligence that makes self-replicating probes in space.
I confessed to George that I am at awe with biological life. After all, the human brain consumes 20 Watts and does better on many tasks than the best AI systems we have developed so far which consume gigawatts of power. Multi-modal analysis is at the unresolved cutting-edge of Machine Learning analysis, whereas the human brain routinely combines data from our eyes, ears and touch.
I asked George about his expectations for the future of humanity. Only one century has passed since the discovery of quantum-mechanics and so we might only have another century left before our civilization will destroy itself technologically. George added that our rate of technological advances is accelerating and the existential risks are growing fast. The end of human history on Earth will likely occur well before the Sun will boil off all oceans on Earth in a billion years.
I noted that the key for survival would be in our ability to escape in a habitable space platform from the rock we were born on. Humanity could survive as long as it will shift priority from investing 2.4 trillion dollars a year on military budget to investing the same amount of money on space exploration.
I do not expect peace-loving hippies to rule the world. Instead, my realistic hope is that discovering aliens as smarter students in our class of intelligent technological civilization, will inspire us to do better. Our Messiah may arrive from another star.
Regarding our future, George noted that the human brain will likely be augmented and become much more powerful in the coming decades. He also believes that our generation will be the first to have the option of not dying because synthetic biology will be able to repair the steady damage to our bodies within the coming decades.
Given his forecast, George and I agreed to continue our conversation in the coming millennia. I wonder what we might talk about in a million years, when science and technology will be far beyond what we imagine today. I do not mind adding alien scientists to the conversation. But I will insist on a remote setup for that podcast recording, as I worry about the aliens infecting George and me with mirror pathogens.
Live long and prosper!
The post Is Terrestrial Life a Von Neumann Machine of Extraterrestrial Origin? appeared first on Anomalien.com.