The Historical Origins of Life

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The origin of life happened once in the universe. We think that was on Earth although you know people have alternative hypothesis it might have emerged somewhere else and then traveled to Earth but it's easier to assume it happened on Earth. It's like you can take the girl out of cosmology but you can't take the cosmologist out of the girl. I don't know what I actually think because I try not to have a firm opinion on these things because then it's difficult to make scientific progress. But scientifically I think the most useful hypothesis is that there are rules underlying the original life which allows us to ask questions about what those rules might be.

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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