The History of Physics and the Search for Life

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"I'm very hopeful there's life out there I think that we don't know enough about what life is though so um so I can't make a concrete statement one way or the other" "The planets we don't find life on are equally informative to the ones that we might find it right because we're at least again it goes back to bounding the probabilitiesYeah so and so I actually yeah exactly," he says. "[T]he history of physics has been really successful in telling us about a lot of reality like trying to learn from that history to project how we should think about other problems that physics hasn't really made traction on yet is really useful"

We are all alive, but “life” is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a “living organism” from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reaction like a forest fire, or an information-processing system like a laptop computer? There is probably no one crisp set of criteria that delineates life from non-life, but it’s worth the exercise to think about what we really mean, especially as the quest to find life outside the confines of the Earth picks up steam. Sara Imari Walker planned to become a cosmologist before shifting her focus to astrobiology, and is now a leading researcher on the origin and nature of life. We talk about what life is and how to find it, with a special focus on the role played by information and computation in living beings.

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Sara Imari Walker received her Ph.D. in physics from Dartmouth college. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Associate Director of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems. She is the co-founder of the astrobiology social network SAGANet, and serves on the Board of Directors for Blue Marble Space.

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