To The Best Of Our Knowledge; What is Life?

From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International, science and the search from meaning, five questions, a special series from to the best of our knowledge and Jim Fleming. This hour, what is life? One of the things we found we cannot define it at alone is the genetic level, and even when it gets booted up in a cell, the cell and that DNA is very much dependent on its environment. That's Craig Venter, the renowned biologist who's trying to create life in a test tube. Today we'll explore some of the fundamental mysteries of life, from how it first started on Earth, to the possibility of supremely intelligent life on other planets. Also, a conversation with the Maverick scientist who gave us Gaia, James Lovelock, and an argument for why technology is evolving like life itself. Technology is producing things that the organic tissues themselves could not produce. It's sort of a way of making things that wet DNA tissue alone could not make. But before we go any further, we figured any talk about the question,

what is life, has to start with this man. Are our bodies and the bodies of the animals, machines, this question, are we automotons, as about as often being answered emphatically in the positive as in the negative? That is a rare recording of the Nobel Prize -winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger. In 1944 he wrote a slim book called What Is Life, which had a profound impact on later generations of chemists and biologists. We asked a few prominent scientists to comment on Schrodinger's influence. Here's Ken Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University, and co -author of the most widely used biology textbook in American high schools. The book What Is Life was based on a series of lectures that Schrodinger gave in England in the early 1940s, I think 1941 and 1942. Those lectures were so memorable that they were transcribed and bound into a book. That book was widely read by physical chemists and biochemists in the late 1940s and early

50s. In fact, James Watson, the co -discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA, said that it was indeed Schrodinger's book What Is Life that convinced him that there ought to be a physical and chemical answer to the notion of what is a gene. And the result, of course, was the double helical structure of DNA. The appeal that book was did life come about spontaneously through molecular interactions or was there some form of divine intervention, which made the whole thing possible? That's Nobel Prize -winning biologist James Watson, who, along with Francis Crick, discovered the basic structure of DNA. I wanted to believe that there was nothing but molecules. That's all we had evidence for. You know, Schrodinger posed the question, what sort of molecule and how could you copy it? Harold Varmus is another prominent scientist who studied Schrodinger's book What Is Life. He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work on retroviruses and later led the National Institutes of Health.

Today Varmus is director of the National Cancer Institute. Of course, the importance of Schrodinger's book was that he said, look, we mystify life, we talk about it in a philosophical way as though there's some kind of spiritual animus, but the fact is that living systems can be reduced to chemistry and physics. Ken Miller says Schrodinger's willingness to ask very big questions is what made his book so revolutionary? Schrodinger was a physicist, and in that book What Is Life, he tried to speculate. Partway between philosophy and partway between physics and chemistry on the chemical nature of the gene. And he said, in fact, that the gene, the unit of inheritance passed from one generation to another, was very, very stable, whereas most things, most atoms, most assemblies in the physical universe are not stable. And in fact, if you pick up a biochemistry textbook, a college level book from the 30s or early 40s, you'll discover that there's a lot of skepticism about the notion that the gene actually could be a molecule. Well, Schrodinger

argued it had to be a molecule, Watson and Crick took that up. So I think Schrodinger did have important things to say, and in particular, he laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of life as a physical and chemical phenomenon. It's now been nearly 70 years since Erwin Schrodinger's book first appeared, and scientists have a pretty good grasp of the basic chemistry and biology of life. But there is another level of thinking about human life in particular that generates a lot of controversy. Again, Harold Varmas, the Nobel Prize -winning biologist. So where do certain of our properties, like generosity, altruism, come from? What is consciousness? How can the brain actually do the things it does based solely on the properties of simple chemicals? James Watson agrees. He says the most profound questions about life, maybe even harder to answer. Now the big question in front of everyone is how does the human brain operate? How can we store such a colossal amount of information and retrieve it sometimes so quickly? How can you

return a tennis ball coming 130 miles an hour? When we hit the ball, it's before we're conscious of hitting the ball. So the brain is, I think, when you get close to it, even more remarkable. There's no computer that can do now what the human brain can. That's James Watson, the legendary co -discover of the double helix structure of DNA. We also heard from Harold Varmas and Ken Miller. You ever stop

to think about just how amazing life is? Craig Venter has, he's another renowned scientist who once poured over Schrodinger's book, What Is Life. Venter says we're still learning about the miraculous nature of life on Earth. We now have discovered a large number of organisms on our planet that can take huge doses of ionizing radiation. It can be totally desiccated, exist in a vacuum. But once it finds water, that organism can rehydrate and repair all the damage that's done and start replicating again. We have organisms that exist in such strong acid or base, if I put my finger in it, my finger would dissolve instantly. But we have bacteria that live in those conditions. I think the world record for temperature right now, thus far in our planet, is a bacteria that lives on an archaea on the order of 120 degrees centigrade, water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. Craig Venter's widely regarded as one of science's leading innovators, and he's not afraid to butt heads with a scientific establishment.

In fact, he competed with the Federal Government's own human genome project to be the first to map our genome. Venter is also at the forefront of efforts to create life from scratch. In May of 2010, he became the first scientist to create a synthetic life form. While his research team didn't actually create life in a test tube, they came as close as anyone has so far. Steve Paulson wanted to know what drives Craig Venter. You are typically described as a maverick scientist with a big ego and a confrontational style. Of course, you famously chose to compete with the huge government program to sequence the human genome. What would you say motivates you as a scientist? Well, scientific discovery is certainly the number one thing that motivates me. I got turned on early to science and found no greater thrill in life than making new scientific discoveries, adding to the knowledge pool, understanding our own lives, understanding our universe

around us, trying to recognize how finite life is, something I'd learned in Vietnam from seeing a large number of young men my age and younger killed there. I felt I came out of Vietnam with a unique gift that so many others didn't have. I had my life in front of me, and I'd been determined to accomplish something with it. Let me ask you about that experience in Vietnam. You were a Navy medic, which I am guessing must have been a harrowing experience. Did you see a lot of people die? I think everybody in Vietnam that was in the medical core unfortunately did. I was there during the Tet Offensive in Denang, and we were overwhelmed with casualties with wounded and the dead and the dying. I had to learn what triage really meant of how to help those that you could and just make comfortable the ones that you clearly could not help. Those are tough lessons to learn at age 20 and 21,

and it changed the direction of my life. How did it change your life? Well, I went from being a poor student in school that nearly flunked out of high school due to lack of interest. Somebody who moved to Southern California after barely graduating from high school to take up a surfing career to coming back to wanting to see how much I could accomplish in my lifetime. I'm wondering if that experience of seeing so much death also influenced your decision to go into medical research. One of the lessons I actually learned in Vietnam was knowledge was power, and it was actually very frustrating how limited the medical profession was. All the diseases that I've ended up working on, I was first exposed to as a Navy corpsman, including malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, even syphilis and gonorrhea, all the organisms that my teams decoded the genomes of to help understanding of those diseases, help come up with new vaccines, new treatments. I want to

pick up on this reputation about you, this idea that you are a maverick scientist who goes his own way. Do you see that as an important part of your identity? Do you think about that and do you instinctively bristle efforts to direct what you do? No, I think it's more important as a scientist, but I think these lessons apply to all aspects of life. I recently told graduating classes that if they're not budding up against dogma, against bureaucracy, against the static state of thinking in our society that they're not doing the right things, we can't keep doing what we're doing as a society and expect to survive long -term on this planet, so to me it's more ashamed, there's not more radical thinking. That's certainly how science moves forward. It goes by people having new ideas that take the whole field a new direction, so it's unfortunate

that it's seen as unusual. So is that why you formed your own company to compete with the federal effort to map the human genome? You felt like there was too much homogeneous thinking there? Well, it was even worse than that, that homogeneous thinking, even though we had a whole new approach to sequence genomes, that in fact allowed us to sequence the first three genomes in history. We couldn't get funding from the federal government because the peer review system cited that these techniques wouldn't in fact not work for sequencing the human genome. So I had the choice of doing nothing because I couldn't get funding. Fortunately, an instrument company that sold sequencing instruments had a new instrument and they were excited about using it with my new technique and they put up money to sequence the human genome. The only catch was they wanted to form a new company. That's what led to Solera. So I would have far preferred to have public funding, but that's not the nature of science funding in this

country. We have tens of billions of dollars available for research, but it's a system that's largely unwilling to fund new ideas. Once new ideas get established, it's relatively easy to get substantial funding to follow up on them. And by the way, every lab that was sure these techniques would not work, have adopted them all as the standard of how genomic science has now done in the field. So I think that sort of proved that the experiment was worth doing. That's Greg Venter, talking with Steve Paulson. Venter was one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome in May of 2010. His research team created the first synthetic life form. So what is life? We asked a few people on the streets outside our studio. I think life is a result of chemical processes, totally explicable by science. Life is taking advantage of everyday opportunities

and not selling yourself short. When I think about life, I make a distinction between life and existence. I guess life has got like a sort of a biological sense to it. To make it simple, I think it's the mere fact of living. I think life is, I guess whatever you make of it, it's an opportunity and a challenge and scary. What is life? Something that doesn't rot, not rotting. I think of organic stuff. I think of bacteria, plants, people, lions, anything that is growing. This weird, unreality that we seem to be living that seems to be like a shadow of what else is beyond that I can't actually fathom right now. Life is the sum total of our emotions, our creativity, our passion, our giftedness, all bundled together, walking the earth,

seeking to make it better, sweeter, more beautiful. Helping those that are disenfranchised and feel that they have no power, living in harmony with others, bringing harmony and beauty to the planet. A special thanks to Brittany Deander for producing that Vox Pop. Coming up, James Lovelock tells the story of his revolutionary Gaia theory. If you expand the definition of life a bit, you can look on planets like the Earth as alive. They regulate their temperatures, they metabolize, they do all sorts of things that living things do. The only thing they don't do is reproduce. For to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. This hour, what is life? Is part of our special series Science and the Search for Meaning, Five Questions. Brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public

Radio International. Our series Science and the Search for Meaning, Five Questions, is supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, supporting science, investing in the big questions, by Promega Corporation, providing tools and technologies for research in life science, and by the newer foundation, exploring meaning and commonality of human experience. Ever since Charles Darwin published the origin of species more than 150 years ago, scientists have been unpacking, step by step, each stage of the evolutionary process.

But there's a very basic question that still mystifies scientists. How did life first begin on Earth, or to put it another way? How did non -life somehow turn into life? That's the question and strange chance asked, University of Wisconsin Geochemist, Nita Sahai. There's a gigantic question here at the center of all of this, which is how could life have begun on Earth? Can you kind of put it in some context? I mean, why is it that that's in some ways so unlikely? To get from simple organic molecules, which are relatively speaking, easy to make, and have been found in meteorites, they've been found in the atmospheres of the moons of Saturn, for example, they've been found in hydrothermal events, so the simple organic molecules are not that difficult to make. To get towards life, you need these simple organic molecules to become longer molecular units, called polymers. These are chains of simple organic molecules bonded together. This requires some input of energy usually, and these are not

easy things to accomplish chemically. And then, once you've got these bigger molecules, they need to what's called a self -assemble, into organized structures. So, for example, a cell is the basic unit of life as we think of it. It has a membrane, a boundary, a wall, which describes what is inside the cell versus what's in the environment outside the cell. So, are you saying that what's crucial for you is when little tiny, tiny containers were created, essentially, because otherwise you've just got a big more of a soup, and it's the moment when you get discreet, contained. Yeah, you know, so I'm just saying little globules, but that's probably not right. Yeah, no, no, that's pretty much it, little globules. It's a pretty good way of describing it. So, is this your vision of what life, what the world was like? Yeah, so this is one of the very first steps, so I'm kind of going to build up from like the single molecule to a polymerized molecule, a longer chain molecule, to when these molecules then get together and form a

self -assembled structure. So, you can, for example, you can have a stack of pencils lying around, but then when you arrange them, when you group them together and put a rubber band around them, then it's much harder to break them. So, you've organized those pencils into a higher order structure. This is an incredibly complex series of events and things that had to happen, maybe actually before we go on any further, I should back up and just ask for a basic definition of life, but it's from a scientist perspective, what is life? Many people have tried to answer that question. What has been sometimes called the NASA definition of life, because NASA is looking for life on other planets, is that it's basically a self -sustained chemical system that is capable of Darwinian evolution. So, the first part is metabolism, self -generation, energy and complicated molecule production. The second part is information transfer, self -replication, reproduction. And the third part is, it's not sufficient just to have something that can keep itself alive and that can reproduce offspring. In order

for life to evolve and become complex, it needs to evolve in fact, which is that it should be able to have mutations. So, that it's not simply copying itself correctly, it has to. There has to be increasing complexity, right? Yeah. You're a geologist, a jig chemist, and so you have a much better picture than the rest of us do of what this planet must have been like 4 .5 billion years ago. When you imagine, you know, those very first amino acids forming, what do you see next in your mind's eye? You know, people have said, well, when did life exactly get started? The earliest fossil evidence for life, what people think is the earliest fossil evidence of bacterial life is about, I believe, 3 .5 billion years ago or 3 .8 billion years ago. There are fossils of bacteria? Yeah. How do you even find a fossilized bacteria? Yeah, so you have to first go to parts of the earth that are really ancient and people have dated rocks using isotopic dating

methods and there are certain places, very few places, less than 0 .5 % of the earth's surface today represents rocks from older than 3 .5 or 4 billion years old. What are some of those places? Oh, so Western Australia is a famous area. Then there's the Kapbal Kraton in South Africa. So these two places, way back when we're joined, they were connected together. For a geologist, is this almost like a sacred site? Yeah, yeah, exactly. These are some of the oldest rocks that are known on the planet. There's also one up here in Canada, in what's called a Slav province. There are some in Greenland. These are all older than about 3 .9 billion years old, so very, very, very early earth being 4 .56 billion years. The one thing I did want to say is that we always think about the environment affecting life in evolution, the natural selection, but also life has made huge effects on the environment. So there was no oxygen on the early earth, or very little,

practically none to speak of. And yet, about 2 .4 billion years ago, there was a big jump in the increase of oxygen, where you actually had free oxygen in the atmosphere, oxygen molecules in the atmosphere. So why did that happen? Well, about 2 .7, 2 .8 billion years ago or even earlier, there were bacteria which had evolved, which were photosynthetic. And so they were releasing oxygen. And you know, in photosynthesis, you take up carbon dioxide and you release oxygen. That's what photosynthesis is. So the bacteria first evolved to develop the ability to make organic molecules by taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and putting out oxygen. But this is really beautiful because what you're saying is that it's not just that life evolved on this planet. It's life created this planet. Yes, life is helping the planet to evolve as much as the planet helped life to evolve. Nita Sahai is a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. She spoke with end strain champs. Is

the earth itself alive? That's the remarkable idea behind the Gaia theory that our planet operates like a living organism. James Lovelock first came up with a Gaia hypothesis in the 1960s when he was working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory trying to figure out if there was life on Mars. By now, scientists have confirmed the basic outlines of the Gaia theory, but it wasn't always so. In fact, Lovelock was once considered a scientific crank, and he couldn't get any scientific journal to publish his research on Gaia. Today, James Lovelock is in his early 90s, and he's one of the world's most celebrated scientists. Steve Paulson recently sat down with Lovelock to talk about the roots of his radical idea. There you were working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in the 1960s, trying to figure out whether Mars might have life, and some of these first ideas came about what what the essence of life was. Was there an aha moment when you suddenly hit on the core of your Gaia idea? Yes, indeed there was. I

remember it vividly. It was in September 1965 when I was in a room with Carl Sagan, now sadly dead, and a philosopher, Lady Diane Hitchcock, who was working with me on these experiments, and into the remarks to an astronomer, Lou Kaplan, carrying an armful of papers, and he said, look at this, look at this. These are the results of the atmospheric analyses of Mars and Venus, done by a French observatory at Pique -de -Middie, showing what is the composition of Mars and Venus' atmospheres, and we said, well, what is it? And he said practically nothing but carbon dioxide. I immediately knew this meant that Mars was high entropy and therefore probably lifeless, and it made me think about the Earth's incredible mixed atmosphere and made me realize suddenly, almost as in a moment, that the presence of oxygen and methane in the Earth's atmosphere means that something

is producing it at the surface, and it would have to be regulated, otherwise it wouldn't stay constant. And that's really the core of your Gaya theory, isn't it, that there's some self -regulating system within Earth itself. There's this complex interaction between living and non -living systems. Exactly, and if you think about it, anything that can regulate the atmospheric gases must be able to regulate the climate. Is that really the radical piece of the Gaya theory? It's this combination of the living and the non -living mechanisms, and together they form this larger entity, what you would consider it, what you call a living organism. You call the Earth as a living organism in itself. Yeah, if you expand the definition of life a bit, you can look on planets like the Earth as alive, they regulate their temperatures, they metabolize, they do all sorts of things that living things do. The only thing they don't do is reproduce, but then something that lives according

to the age of the universe hardly needs to reproduce. I want to take you back to those early years when you were just developing this theory, and some other people started to come up with similar ideas in the 1970s. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote his famous book The Lives of a Cell, and he wrote about how the outer membrane of the cell is crucial to the cell's organization. Essentially, it creates the space for pockets of order within a larger sea of disorder, and then he drew an analogy between the membrane of the cell and the Earth as a whole. I guess after he saw those photos that came back from the first Apollo missions, and he wrote about how the Earth constructed its own membrane by modifying the atmosphere around it. Was that basically the same idea that you had? Yes, it wasn't indeed, and there's no question that I think we were both thinking of the same kind of thing. There have been people, of course, who've taken your idea of Gaia into more religious directions, most famously, all those newagers who talk about Mother Earth as kind of a spiritual entity in itself. What do you make

of their enthusiasm for Gaia? Well, as a scientist, I must admit, they were an awful nuisance to me, but I have enormous synthesis. I think in every one of us, there is a need for something spiritual, if you want to call it that. A need to think outside the straight jacket of science. I respect that. It was awkward for me trying to introduce a theory that the biologist thought I was talking about a religion. Were you ever tempted to abandon the word Gaia? Oh, often, yes. Of course, other scientists who follow the similar lines use the term Earth's system science, but I don't think you can move anybody with a term like that. The word Gaia, after all, is the four letter word, and it was suggested by a really wonderful novelist, William Golding, a Nobel Prize -winning novelist, who the heck would turn down an offer like that? Wasn't he an old drinking buddy of yours, back in England? Yes, he was, indeed.

After that eureka moment at JPL, I was back in Britain and I was talking with him. We often talked and I told him about it, and he said, well, if you're going to come up with big ideas like that, you better give it a proper name, so I suggest you call it Gaia. Now, you mentioned that when your Gaia theory first came out, it got a lot of flag from scientists, especially from biologists. Why do you think your theory of Gaia drew so much criticism from the scientific establishment? Because they felt a real threat. After all, you see, you have the biologist talking about the evolution of life, Darwinism, in one set of buildings across the Croddwangle, and on the other side, there was the geologist talking about the evolution of the material earth, and they were both happy. This was a kind of modus for Vendai that enables them to teach generation after generation as students in completely the wrong thing, for them to have to throw away all their textbooks and go back and start again. Well, that's one heck of a threat to a biologist or a

geologist, so they didn't like it one bit. And how would you assess the state of scientific thinking about Gaia now? Well, they've accepted Gaia almost completely. There's a great meeting at Amsterdam in 2001, where over a thousand scientists signed a declaration, the Amsterdam declaration saying that the earth is a self -regulating system made up of all life, including humans, the ocean, the air, and the surface rocks, and it self -regulates climate and chemistry. Oh, that's as close to Gaia as you can get. So it's mainstream science, but having said that, they don't then apply it in their work. You see, the geophysicists of the IPCC know this, but they don't know how to put it in their models. You spent decades in the wilderness, you could say, I mean, in terms of what mainstream science was saying, you were denounced after your first book about Gaia came out. I mean, by a lot of scientists, do you feel vindicated now?

I guess I do in a way, but it wasn't that bad. You see, I chose to do science independently. I could never have worked on a subject like Gaia at a university or a government or a commercial lab. I would have been told to stop it immediately. It was both bringing distribute on the institute or university, and it wasn't bringing any profits or anything useful in. So you have to be independent to do a subject like that. That used to be the norm in science. It's only become organized and sort of run by grants and things in recent years. So when you say you were doing this independently, what you were just working out of your house, did you just create a laboratory in your house to work out these models? That's right. It was very easy for scientists to get a ride on a ship, for example, and take some measurements, which I did on one of the British Antarctic ships, the Shackleton, that went from Britain down to Antarctica and back. That made some very useful measurements that supported the theory.

I could also get a ride on military aircraft and things like that. It's very easy if you're an independent on your own to do those kind of things. Very difficult if you're working in a university or a government lab. Did you have trouble getting your results published in scientific journals? Not that sort of result, like the measurements in the stratosphere or the ocean. No, that's fairly straightforward, but any paper on Gaia was damned. You'd only do it in the title, and the peer reviewers would throw it out immediately as new age rubbish. So how did you get around that? By writing books, that was the only way I could get my scientific data in the public environment. But it was rather sad because the scientists would not quote the books, because they said they wouldn't quote them because they weren't peer reviewed. So are there larger lessons than about how science is done and how to take on big ideas when they are considered unacceptable by the scientific establishment? I suppose so, although individual experiences are almost my nature unique, and what suited me may not suit many

other people, but for those that feel inclined to do it, I would say give it a whirl as long as you don't burn your boats and you can go back. That's James Lovelock talking with Steve Paulson about his Gaia theory. Coming up, why technology is evolving like a living organism? For to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. This hour, what is life? Is part of our special series, Science and the Search for Meaning, Five Questions. Brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. Our series, Science and the Search for Meaning, Five Questions,

is supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, supporting science, investing in the big questions, by Promega Corporation, providing tools and technologies for research in life science, and by the newer foundation, exploring meaning and commonality of human experience. Kevin Kelly is one of the founders of Wired Magazine. For the past two decades, he's been a kind of roving philosopher of technology. Someone who asks the biggest questions about our technological future. Now he's written a provocative book called What Technology Wants. Kelly says the sum total of all our technology, what he calls the technium, is taking on the properties of life itself. Technology is not just the hardware and gadgets in our pocket. It's basically anything that our mind produces, and that would include things we might normally think of as sort of cultural artifacts, a movie, a symphony, a law, a calendar, all those kinds of intangible things, as well as the

hard, cold things of steam engines and railways. All this stuff that our mind produces, that large output of our collective mind, is an extension and acceleration of the evolutionary forces that produce life. It just keeps going. Technology, or the technium, is producing things that the organic tissues themselves cannot produce. Let's play out some of the evolution, if you will, the connections between the evolution of living organisms and the evolution of technology. Can you summarize for us the key stages in human evolution? What really makes a difference in our development? As primates, we settled throughout Africa, and I think the major transition, the first transition in the creation of ourselves, in which we kind of created our own humanity, was the invention of language. After the invention of language, we completely transformed our species. We

had a population explosion, we kind of spread out throughout the world. We settled across the globe, expanding at the rate of one mile per year, and then we immediately began killing off most of the megafauna, and as we began to get into agriculture, we began to affect, actually, for the first time, the climate of the planet. We invented things like cooking, which is kind of like an external stomach, that changed our diet and nutrition, and actually changed our physical bodies. Our jaws became smaller, we had different kind of teeth. We have been changing ourselves. We've been remaking ourselves, in a certain sense, we are the first animals that we domesticated. So you have to think of ourselves as self -made in some senses. In that sense, we are both technology and the makers of technology. We are both the agents of change and the thing that have been changed. And again, it's fascinating to look at it, isn't it? You don't think of language as being that essential, although up until that point, there was the ability to make

tools, but the development of tools didn't proceed at any great pace. Indeed, chimps use tools and some birds use little straws to get things out. Tool use itself is not a human invention, but I think there's some controversy about nanothole and its relationship to sapiens, and one of the big unknowns is whether a nanothole had the full use of languages. We know it, I suspect not, but it's true that the nanothole actually made hand tools. However, the thing about the nanothole hand tools is that no matter where they were, they're basically always the same tool. The difference with the sapien use of tools was almost from the beginning when language came along, we began to have specialized tools. We had the scrapers and cutters and spear points. And so what I see the technique I'm doing is accelerating the pace of evolution through life. So you think we should think of technology basically as an extension of ourselves, not of our body, maybe of our genes, but of our minds.

Yes, it's an extension of our life itself. An extension of biological evolution. Yes, exactly. The extension and acceleration of evolution. What technology is doing is increasing the ways in which this system can evolve. And as we look into the future, we're going to find out and discover or make or create even more ways to evolve or learn. I think this frightens a lot of people, and I think I can understand why in a way, and it may be why we have always viewed technology as something that only exists outside ourselves. I mean, we invented it, right? It can only do what we tell it to do, right? Is that wrong? I mean, we cling to that. Yes, if you begin to view this thing that we've made as to having some of its own autonomy, and again, autonomy is not binaries, not like they are not there as a continuum. And once we give it some autonomy, it means that, oh my gosh, it may do something that we

haven't intended it to do. And that is scary. That is scary. The technique on as you've described it, do you see it as developing some kind of universal mind that goes beyond technologies and humans for that matter? Will it take on some of the qualities that we sometimes associate with God? I did a calculation of the number of transistors in all the computers in the world that are connected to the internet. If you sum up all the transistors in the two billion computers and the data servers and everything else is connected to the internet right now, and to imagine that all of them made sort of one large brain, that the number of transistors is approximately the same number of neurons in a human brain. And if you count up all the number of links on the web, that the number of web links is approximately the number of synapses in our human brain, which suggests, in a certain sense, that the complexity of

the internet as a whole is approximately the same level of complexity of a brain. I don't think it's as smart or rare or intelligent, but it certainly seems to be going in that direction. So right now, no, there's no mind there, but we've made a kind of planetary something or other that is a force in the world. Whether conscious or not, it has its own agenda and biases. That's Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired Magazine. His book is called What Technology Wants. Okay, so maybe technology is evolving like life itself, but what should we make of the new virtual worlds that can seem as real as actual life, or at least the people and trees around us, where people can make friends and fall in love with a click of a button. Here's

anthropologist Tom Belstorf with a tour through one such virtual world, second life. A virtual world could, in theory, look like or be anything, because a virtual world is really just a place. That's what makes it different from the regular internet from a website, is that it's a place where you and I could be there together in real time as avatars and talk to each other and have a kind of physical environment. That's that's three -dimensional. So if you teleport into second life for the first time, you'll see green grass and a blue sky with a sun in it, unless it's night, and then you'll see a moon in stars, and there's an ocean with water, and there's trees that flap around in a second life breathes, and there's you with a body with legs and feet and the head and all that, and you'll probably going to see roads and buildings and things like that around you. Now your avatar can fly, and you don't need to either sleep, you can change the gender or the look of your avatar instantaneously, and you can also teleport anywhere in the world at the blink of an eye, so you don't have to walk or

even fly everywhere, which is good, because it's a really big space. There's sort of different ranges of things that people do. There's people who just hang out there in a very casual way, and then there's people who run businesses that they're making $10 ,000 a month US, or people who go there to meet people from other countries and practice their Chinese and go to Chinese areas of second life to practice a language. When virtual worlds and these technologies first got started, there was often a confusion between virtual world and virtual reality. Virtual reality technology means where you put like the 3D goggles and you think that you're in this 3D space and all that kind of fancy stuff, and that's still around, but what's been so interesting is that virtual worlds are mostly used with a computer screen and a mouse, and most people don't seem to care about sensory immersion, right, that you're like in some kind of tanker with goggles or whatever. What has turned out to be much more

important is social immersion, and I remember doing my research when one person said, you know, the amazing thing about second life is that you get to know people from the inside out instead of the outside in. What they meant is I meet you in second life. I don't know if you're really a man or a woman. I don't know if you're really from Brazil or the United States, or maybe I don't know if you're disabled, maybe you only have one leg, maybe you're 30 years older than I am, I don't know. I just get to know you for who you, quote unquote, really are. So for this person, for a lot of people in second life, relationships can in an interesting way be almost more authentic than the ones in the physical world because they're based on that pure social relationship. In some cases, that can turn into love, and you can have a wedding in second life. Why not? I've been to several, and I would teleport in, and there's a beautiful church that has flowers everywhere and pews, and there's a pastor efficient up at the front, which may or may not be a religious figure in the physical world. And there's the bride and groom, and all the women attending are all dressed up. Everyone likes to dress up in second life, or at least most people do. And we all sit

together and make little comments using text chat, usually not voice, because you don't want to get in the way of the proceedings. And often there's sort of a fun twist to the ceremony where the pastor might say, do you take this person to be your second life wife, and may no lag? Do you under, meaning, you know, the slowing down that can sometimes happen in the virtual world? And in some cases, all this could happen without you ever knowing one thing about that spouse in the actual world. Are they married in the physical world? Are they really a man or a woman? In some cases, people don't know, and they don't care. They say, this is what's important to me as this relationship in second life. Tom Belstorf is an anthropologist at UC Irvine, and all through the book Coming of Age in Second Life. Life, as we know it, is universally based on some combination of carbon compounds. But what if life exists based on another element? For instance, Silicon. You're creating fantasies, Mr. Spock.

Not necessarily, but I've heard of the theoretical possibility of life based on Silicon, but Silicon -based life would be of an entirely different order. Silicon -based life is physiologically impossible. Well, is it? Astrobiologist Paul Davies says alien intelligence might be stranger than anything Star Trek could possibly dream up. Davies chairs the SETI Post Detection Task Group, and is the author of the book The Eerie Silence, renewing our search for alien intelligence. Steve Paulson talked with Davies. For decades, SETI has focused most of its efforts looking for radio signals from another planet that you say this may be a mistake. Is there a better way to look for ET? I think what we should do is widen the search. The search for so -called narrow -band radio signals, which is a bit like tuning into this radio station now, has been going on for 50 years. But I think that there's very little reason why ET should be beaming messages directly out of sat this particular time. I just don't think that's credible, because the nearest civilization, even

by optimistic estimates, is likely to be hundreds of light years away. And they see Earth as it was hundreds of years ago before there were any radio transmitters here. And so there's no particular reason that they would do it till they knew we were on the air. Of course, the other possibility, and it's a very real possibility, is that there is no intelligent life elsewhere, that the conditions on Earth were so unique, and that those life -giving requirements just simply do not exist anywhere else in the universe. This is a really important point to get across, that there is this general assumption these days that the universe is going to be teaming with life, and that there'll be intelligent life out there somewhere. But it was not always thus. When Setty began 50 years ago, one might as well have professed a belief in theories. The prevailing view, particularly among biologists, back in the 60s and 70s, was that life on Earth is a bizarre, freak accident. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and your often see statements, even by very distinguished scientists, saying, what the universe is so vast, there has to be life

out there somewhere. But it does not follow. The one thing that we are pretty sure about is that there's plenty of real estate on which life as we know it may have arisen. That is, there are lots of other Earths. I think we can be fairly confident of that. Maybe a billion or more within our galaxy alone. Plenty of places that life could happen, but what we don't know, we absolutely don't know, is given another Earth -like planet, what are the chances are that life will obligingly pop out? Now my sense is that most biologists who study this assume that life elsewhere would evolve along similar Darwinian lines, and probably some highly intelligent creature would end up looking kind of like human beings. I mean, there are certain evolutionary reasons why we did evolve. Do you agree with this line of thinking? I think it's far from obvious that the course of evolution on another planet would parallel that on Earth. It's easy for us to take the end product and look back and see all the reasons why humans, for example, have ended up with big heads and

eyes stuck in them and limbs and so on. But it could play out very differently on other planets. Now, it's true that there are trends that will tend to amplify. So, for example, wings are obviously a great idea, and once you've got a little wing, may make more sense for it to get bigger and bigger and bigger, but if I'm to give a counter example, we think of the elephant's trunk as a sort of rather bizarre aberration. It's an adaptation that works well for elephants, but it's very hard to imagine that on another planet, or if we reran evolution here on Earth, that you would end up with creatures with trunks. But you are suggesting that it's entirely possible if there is extra terrestrial intelligence out there that it might be completely different than human beings? I mean, who knows? It might not even be in biological form. It might be some very advanced computer. When I was writing this book, I persuaded myself that biological intelligence was just a transitory phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. And we can see this even in our own society that Google is smarter than any human being on the planet. We have networked our information processing that is beyond

the reach of any one biological entity, and that over time, almost all of the intellectual heavy lifting here on Earth is going to be done by designed and distributed systems, and we'll give up using words like computers and robots and so on, because they're very old -fashioned. Because something like a networked information processing system is immortal, and we have some gigantic throbbing artificial megabrain. And we can imagine that a civilization that is much older than ours would long ago have passed on the mantle of the intellectual stratosphere to some sort of design distributed system. Are you saying in this model there wouldn't be any biological basis to that civilization at all? It would be strictly computer chips? Oh, I think that the biology is the first step along the way to this design systems, but even computer chips, I think, would betray a very old -fashioned view of this, because we can imagine, in fact, people are designing neural nets that might involve real biological components, melded

together with electronic components, so with circuitry, which is part biological, part non -biological, and after while those distinctions are going to disappear, the crucial thing is they are designed systems. That's the point. They are artificial. They're designed systems. They're not evolving by Darwinian means. They're evolving by design. And that's very much more rapid. And so, very soon, once you get into designed intelligence, and maybe intelligence is not what we're after. Maybe it is information processing power, maybe it's wisdom. You know, there are sorts of other things that we can imagine this entity to do. Then biology, flesh and blood beings with big heads, they're left a long way behind. They're not necessarily going to phase themselves out. There may be planets that have this gigantic throbbing megabrain, and they've got humanoid creatures attending to it. That's Paul Davies, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University, and author of the eerie silence, renewing our search for alien intelligence. He spoke with Steve Paulson.

For to the best of our knowledge, and Jim Fleming, this hour, what is life is part of our special series Science and the Search for Meaning, Five Questions, brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio. Original theme music for the series was written by Steve Mullen at Walk West Productions. For more information on this series and to find additional material about the topics we've explored, please go to our website at ttbook .org slash science and meaning. And special thanks to two of our sponsors for Science and the Search for Meaning, the John Templeton Foundation, supporting science, investing in the big questions, and Promega Corporation, providing tools and technologies for research in life science. P -R -I Public Radio International