What Is Life?
- What Is Life? What Is To Be Alive?
A series of live conversations / Podcasts between writer Carl Zimmer and eight leading thinkers on the question of what it means to be alive. What Is Life? was recorded at Caveat in New York and is supported by a grant from Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative.
Episode 1. Carlos Mariscal: What Do We Mean When We Ask, “What Is Life?”
- Carlos Mariscal is a philosopher at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He collaborates with evolutionary biologists and astrobiologists to explore what it means to be alive. When we ask what is life, Mariscal suggests, we may be asking the wrong question.
- “Life and Only Life: A Radical Alternative to Life Definitionism.” Synthese 2018. Mariscal’s research page.
Episode 2. Sara Walker: If We Find Alien Life, Will We Even Know It?
- Sara Imari Walker is a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University. She studies life as a physical phenomenon, in order to develop new ways to search for it elsewhere in the universe. We shouldn’t assume that aliens will introduce themselves to us, so we need a way to recognize life no matter what form it takes.
- Walker at ASU
- Sara Walker’s TEDx talk about a “universal theory of life.”
Episode 3. Jim Cleaves: The Origin of Life, from Frankenstein to a Laboratory Spark
- H. James Cleaves, a professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo and co-author of A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life, speaks of the origins of life. As Cleaves explains, virtually no one thought of this particular question 200 years ago. It took some visionaries — including Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein — to shift our view of life to something that could arise through natural processes.
- Cleaves at ELSI
Episode 4. Caleb Scharf: How Did Life Begin?
- Caleb Scharf explains that we don’t know how life got its start. But as more evidence emerges, a few theories are emerging as leading contenders. Scharf is the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University.
Episode 5. Jeremy England: Why Does Life Exist?
- Jeremy England, a physicist at MIT, talks about why life exists. He has developed an influential theory of life as a way for matter to dissipate energy.
Episode 6. Steven Benner: How Weird Can Life Get?
- Steven Benner, a scientist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, talks about how strange life can get. All the life we know is the same: carbon-based, with DNA for genes. (Okay, except for RNA viruses.) But Benner says we should remain open to the possibility that life elsewhere is very, very weird.
Episode 7. Donato Giovannelli: Warm Ponds Or Hellish Vents–Where Did Life Begin?
- Donato Giovannelli is an assistant professor at the University of Naples “Federico II.” He travels to acid lakes and other extreme environments that are the closest thing today to what Earth was like when life began.
Episode 8. Kate Adamala: Can We Make Life?
- Kate Adamala is a chemist at the University of Minnesota. In her Protobiology Lab, she is trying to build a synthetic cell from scratch.
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