New Books in the History of Science Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, "Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life" (Basic Books, 2024)
Aug 21, 2025
Jack Szostak, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist from the University of Chicago, joins Mario Livio to explore the origins of life on Earth and the hunt for extraterrestrial life. They discuss the RNA world hypothesis and how complex nucleotides could have formed from early Earth chaos. The conversation touches on pioneering experiments like Miller-Urey, questioning if life is unique to Earth or a universal phenomenon. With insights on how cellular structures can aid evolution, they dive into the cosmic possibilities of life beyond our planet.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
How The Book Collaboration Began
- Mario Livio invited Jack Szostak to co-author the book because of complementary expertise.
- They collaborated closely and iterated on each other's chapters to create a unified voice.
Second Origin Would Prove Life Is Easier
- Finding a second independent origin of life would imply life is not extremely hard to originate.
- That discovery would strongly increase confidence that lab pathways to life are realistic.
Reservoirs Replace The Primordial Soup
- Modern origin-of-life thinking favors stepwise reservoirs over a single primordial soup.
- Key intermediates likely accumulated in stable reservoirs and were later combined under favorable conditions.
