The Importance of Information in Life Information Theory

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I think there is a lot of scope for creativity questions that are easy to ask and hard to answer. I would actually flip you know okay that's also true that's alsotrue so easy to ask some questions hard to ask the right questions yes yeahYeah, it's very hard to describe what you know like you can't say something concrete about some of it but at least this idea that that life is life has universal properties and they're ones that could be formalized in a quantitative way. So we might just need to figure out all the parameters that we need to measure to say something about how alive because life is a complex system.

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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