The Roadblocks to Intelligent Life in the Universe

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Life happened very quickly on Earth but took a long time for it to become multicellular. Life only became complex when there were those giant evolutionary bolognaes and life just had to find a way to survive. Intelligence isn't necessarily that good of a thing, like we could sterilize Earth right now if we get into some big atomic conflicts. It has its... The intelligence has its drawbacks. So I think it's possible to imagine there would be complex multicellular life somewhere in the universebut the probability of it developing a sapency of any sort is rather low.

Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientists engaged in the ambitious project of trying to create living cells, or something approximating them, starting from entirely non-living ingredients. Impressive progress has already been made. Designing cells from scratch will have obvious uses is biology and medicine, but also allow us to build biological robots and computers, as well as helping us understand how life could have arisen in the first place, and what it might look like on other planets.

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Katarzyna (Kate) Adamala received her Ph.D. working with Pier Luigi Luisi at the University of Rome and Jack Szostak at Harvard. She is currently an assistant professor of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the Build-A-Cell international collaboration, which brings together multiple groups to work on constructing artificial life.

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