Ep 015: Cole Mathis
This Robo-generated transcript has been finessed by a human being (thank you, Aaron Leventman). Please forgive any remaining errors...
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Caitlin McShea (0s): Greetings fellow stalkers and welcome back to Alien Crash Site. This week's episode revisits some of the conversation that I had last time with Natalie Elliott about the origins of life, but instead of just wildly speculating about what I think life might look like, what it does or how to find it, this week, I spend an hour talking to Cole Mathis, a man who literally wrote the paper on it. The paper. I honestly have not been this excited about a scientific publication in months. So in an effort to be truly transparent to all of you, I will concede that this week's conversation is a bit of a personal indulgence, but stick with me.
Cole Mathis just took a new position as a NASA astrobiology fellow, where he will be working with NASA and Arizona State University and the Santa Fe Institute for a continuation of his origins of life and life detection research. He did his PhD work with Sara Walker at Arizona State. Readers of our Atlantis dispatch series will certainly recognize that name. She is a theoretical physicist and an astrobiologist who was very thoughtfully approaching the incomplete and/or broken nature of quote universal laws of physics.
Because when life comes into the picture, things get really messy. We are very big fans. And then after his PhD, cultic a postdoc position in Scotland, where he was working with professor Leroy Cronin. Lee is the Regis Chair of chemistry at the University of Glasgow and almost suspiciously industrious individual. He is an experimentalist with a capital E and he led the surge. He led the charge on this assembly enterprise. These three, along with Stuart Marshall, Emma Carrick, Graham Keenan, Geoffrey Cooper, Matthew Craven, Douglas Moore, and Heather Graham all contributed to this huge and novel approach to confirming, let me say again, confirming the presence of a living system in space. As a side note, I should say that Heather Graham has also agreed to come on to the podcast in the near future. So stay tuned for that one. Anyway, this week, Cole Mathis is the one who dares to venture into this zone and break it all down for us. Get it, break it down. It's a joke. You'll see why. Anyway, I've linked this paper in our show notes, along with the philosophy of science article that Cole sent me, which we do discuss briefly before we seek out his illuminating alien artifact. Listeners of Alien Crash Site know that this podcast is framed within the context of Roadside Picnic, a seventies, Soviet science fiction, novel that takes place after an alien visitation to earth.
But if you're just tuning into this podcast for the first time, I want to clarify what I mean by alien specifically for this episode. So the aliens that exist in Roadside Picnic took a brief respite on earth before they moved on to greener pastures in the universe, so to speak, but they left in their wake, a variety of really odd objects that don't seem to matter to them, but matter greatly to the human beings that unearth them. So while what they left behind might be to them as significant as a saran sandwich wrapper, when discovered by and utilized by humanity, they are revolutionary new technologies.
These are the aliens that Cole and I are talking about at the second half of this program. The first half of this program, the aliens that we refer to are any form of life in outer space. What's so cool though, is that assembly does its job in the presence of either simple or intelligent alien life. Therefore, we felt totally confident to forge ahead. All that laid out. I think it's time to get to it. My name is Caitlin McShea. This is the Santa Fe institutes’, speculative science fiction podcast, Alien Crash Site set your lasers to eviscerate and get ready to go.
Oh, and watch out for all that.
Caitlin McShea (4m 7s): Lots to cover. Very excited about this.
Cole Mathis (4m 10s): It should be fun. I'm doing good. It's unbearably hot in Phoenix, but that's, that's pretty normal.
Caitlin McShea (4m 20s): Yeah. It seems like that is the norm. That's par for the course. It's actually really hot in Santa Fe for reasons. I don't quite understand. We've had a good amount of rain, but it's like 95, which is like, well, I mean to got 110, but we're not. It totally is. Yeah. So I'm, I'm adjusting. Hopefully you're adjusting because you just relocated from a different climb.
Cole Mathis (4m 41s): Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was great to move from Glasgow to Phoenix in like late winter, early spring. It was a relief. And then now I'm looking out the windows of all my friends’ apartments in Glasgow and I'm like, oh no, what have I done?
Caitlin McShea (4m 59s): Well, I think that you made a good move. I want to give context to our audience about why I invited you here, but maybe it would be easier if we start by you telling us about your new role and what led up to it and what you are after.
Cole Mathis (5m 11s): Sure. Yeah. So I'm about to start a new position that's sort of between three different institutions. So I've been awarded a NASA postdoctoral fellowship. So NASA is one of the institutions. And then I'm going to be working with Sara Walker who actually did my PhD with at ASU and then Chris Kempes at SFI. So it's sort of yeah. Triangulating between these three institutions. And the whole goal of the project is to develop this life detection system that I worked with Leroy Cronin in Glasgow and Sara as well on developing.
And yeah, we can talk a lot more about that work, but the idea is to take it more in both a computational and theoretical direction. So using some publicly available databases there, and some ideas about scaling with Chris to try to turn these ideas that we developed, that we've sort of tested here on earth into something we can use in a flight ready instrument so we can send it to space and look for aliens.
Caitlin McShea (6m 12s): That's very exciting. And so there's the segue, right? This podcast is steeped in fiction. It assumes that aliens have already visited earth 13 years ago. I live in New Mexico. I can't deny that that's true, but it would seem that many don't agree with that statement. And you are one, you are seeking actively alien life forms in the universe.
Cole Mathis (6m 30s): I am. Yeah, but I have to say if I was pushed on it, I have to think that we can't be the only ones. And I can talk more about why I have to think that for sort of my research interests, but, yeah, I don't think they'd been to earth yet. At least not that we've recognized.
Caitlin McShea (6m 47s): Okay. I think that's fair. I tend to agree, but this is why I get to revel in fiction. Right? This is the, the merits of fiction and art. And we'll probably talk about that later too. So it's specifically the timing around having you on this podcast is because of its fantastic paper that you were just a part in publishing along with Lee, along with Sara, Heather Graham and others, which I think is fantastic. And I think what's amazing about it and I'll try to frame it in what we call the great phosphine freakout of 2020 is that this method that you and your group propose sort of eliminates a lot of the red flags, false positives that have existed so long in forms of trying to detect life in the universe.
So maybe you could take a moment to try to explain assembly a bit and then I'll try to push on some little questions, holes problems.
Cole Mathis (7m 36s): Yeah. Thanks for that. I'm really excited to talk about this paper in particular on this podcast, because I think the framing of this podcast and the sort of ideas developed in this paper, I have a lot in common, which is great. So this paper that came out in Nature Communications has been in the works for a long time. And I think Lee originally had an idea around this way back in like 2015 before I ever started working with him. But, you know, with through various stages. And then by the time I got to Glasgow several years ago, they were sort of at the stage where they had started collecting data and doing experiments.
So to describe the paper, the idea is that we want to be able to look for life that's not like earth life, and that's a hard problem. You're going to have Heather on, she's going to talk a lot about agnostic biosignatures, that's sort of the language we use to describe what we're doing. That we want to be able to detect life. That's the biosignatures part, but we don't want to be so biased by the example of like we have here on earth that we can't see sort of clearly living things right in front of us. And so a lot of detection methods depend on being able to identify specific molecules that we associate with life or specific phenomenon like carbon fixation that we associate with life here on earth.
And so there's this big question of like, well, if there is this really interesting alien biochemistry out there, that's nothing like what we know, how would we see it? And so the idea behind assembly theory, which is this sort of novel theoretical framework that's mostly been developed for molecules, but there's plans in the works that have got to deploy it for things like atmospheres and for texts and all sorts of other applications, which is really exciting. But the idea is basically you can measure the number of steps it would take to make an object.
And we make this claim that when the number of steps to make an object in a sort of particular way that I'll describe is really high it requires information. Sort of the implication is that you, if you see something that's really complex, you know, that the thing that made it was using information in a particular way. So information kind of a loaded term. And I can talk more about what I mean there, but when it comes to molecules, what this means is we came up with this complexity measure called the assembly index and we developed a ways to calculate it based just on sort of the structure of molecules, right?
So basically here's the bonds. Here’s the atoms. Once we have that, we can compute this assembly index. And then we went about coming up with a way to measure this in the lab, right? So we use lab in Glasgow as an experimental lab, which was a big change for me coming from a sort of theoretical side. And so we wanted a way to measure it. And we use a technique called tandem mass spectrometry, which is a little technical, but it's not so complicated. Basically you've got some molecules, you ionize them and you send them through an electric field.
You can separate them based on their mass. And then the tandem part of the spectrometry comes from you can select one of those ions or millions of them and send it through a collision cell, break it into pieces and then send those pieces back into your mass spectrometer. So what this allows you to do is basically take a molecule, break it into pieces and then talk about how many pieces it broke into and sort of what the relative proportions of those were. And so we found that using this technique, if we counted the number of pieces of molecule broke into this roughly correlated with the sort of assembly index that we had calculated.
And so then this is great. So basically we have this theoretical idea that, when we see high assembly number molecules, they must be made by life because they're being made using information. And as far as we can tell, there's no other living system, no other systems in the universe that use information besides living systems, and we've got a way to detect it. So then once we have those two things in place, we tested a bunch of samples that were sort of varying degrees of alive and dead, very degrees of sort of challenging from the chemistry perspective.
So we cooked up some stuff in the lab, like meilleury type experiments, nasty sort of prebiotic soups. We got a bunch of like rocks and things that were definitely dead. And then we had like Ecolab lysates and beer and scotch whiskey, lots of things that were clearly alive or made by living things. And then Heather at NASA hooked us up with some really cool samples, including the merchants in meteorite which is this very famous, like organic, rich media, full of really diverse molecules.
And so that was like sort of one of the hardest samples that we tested. So we tested this idea and we went and measured the assembly number of the most abundant ions and all these samples. And, you know, we didn't, we didn't falsify our hypothesis. We showed that the data was sort of consistent with what we were thinking that only the living samples had really high assembly numbers present in them. And all of the dead samples were full of very simple sort of boring molecules, including the merchants of meteorite which we weren't sure if that was going to work because people found so many complex things or what they used to describe as complex, but they're really just sort of complex for a biotic chemistry.
So this is all really exciting. And one of the coolest parts about this is NASA and other agencies have sent mass spectrometers to space in the past, going all the way back to the Viking missions. So there's like a huge legacy of doing mass spec in space. So the next sort of step is to see what we can do with the mass spectrometers that are already being sent to space and then to see what the minimum constraints we would need to get to NASA to do this at higher resolution in space would be, and that's going to be a big part of what I'm doing and with SFI and NASA and ASU
Caitlin McShea (13m 22s): Exciting. Yeah. That was my question because I know I had Nina Lanza on earlier. She has the super cam on the curiosity and the perseverance Rover on Mars. And it seems like those specs operated enough AMU that you could employ this method, but like older ones or probes that were sent a long time ago that are finally getting to interesting locations. Those don't yet have the resolution to do this.
Cole Mathis (13m 45s): Yeah. So it's two things. It's the resolution, which we're not quite sure how important that will be yet, but the really big thing is the sort of tandem part of the mass spectrometry. So the instrument that we used in Lee's lab is called an Orbitrap, which is sort of like pop the line and it's got actually separate detection units. So when you do the second step of selecting the ion and breaking into pieces, you can look at just those pieces. For the instruments that we've sent so far to space, you can do the fragmentation bit, but it's not isolated in its own detection unit. So it's a little bit trickier to, to disentangle the signal. We think we can do it, but we're not sure yet we haven't sort of tested it in this types of samples we would expect to get.
Caitlin McShea (14m 30s): That’s clarifying. So I do want to push you a little bit on information as the source for what might be the consequences of a living system because I think the claim that's made in this paper is that as the molecular assembly number increases, the likelihood that this thing is the consequence of a series of random events decreases. And so information seems somehow antithetical to randomness. And I think you could elucidate that for our audience. It'd be very helpful.
Cole Mathis (14m 58s): So I'll give it a shot because it often means many different things to many people. But I think this contrast with randomness is really helpful. So one thing about chemistry that I didn't appreciate until I started working in a chemistry lab is that the number of possible molecules is enormous. It is like unbelievably huge. And the number of possibilities just goes up and up faster. You know, I used to say like, oh, these numbers are astronomically large, but like astronomical scales are not appropriate for like the number of possible chemicals there are. It's like even more than stars in the Milky Way and galaxies in the universe. And so what does that have to do with information? So information, I think you could describe as the thing that sort of distinguishes one thing out of many possibilities. And that sort of ties it to what Shannon was talking about back in the forties and fifties, when he talked about like Shannon's theory of information that he developed, which was essentially about passing messages through noisy channels.
And the goal there was like information is the amount of reduction in your uncertainty is the sort of traditional way to say it. So it's like, I'm maybe spelling a word. And I say, okay, it starts with the letter A and then I tell you, it ends with N and then it's five letters. And like, eventually you work out like, oh, you're telling me alien. And so the information there is basically when I told you it started with A, there was a bunch of five letter words that were instantly removed.
And when I told you, it ended with N there were a bunch of other five letter words that were gone. So the information is the thing that selects a specific thing, the specific word alien out of like this huge ocean of possible alternatives. And so this gets back to why information in chemistry is so important. The number of ways to make molecules is just so large that if you find something that's very specific out of that huge possibility you know that there must be information sort of guiding there.
And so sort of tie back to this contrast with randomness, it could be that like randomly, you make a bond here that sort of increases the complexity of the molecule, but the chance that you do that a million times in a row for the same molecules becomes, so unfathomably small, you shouldn't even think of it as a real number. Like the cutoff we use in the paper is one an Avogadro's number or one in a mole which is like 10 to the 23. It's like when you get that at zero.
And so that works really well for the type of analytical technique we have, because with mass spectrometry, you don't really detect things unless got sort of at least hundreds of thousands to millions of identical copies of molecules. So again, this is another thing where it's like, if you're a detecting this molecule, you know that there were millions of identical copies, and the only way there could be millions of identical copies is by ruling out all of these other possible sort of molecular alternatives.
And that process of ruling those alternatives out is like information and sort of a very specific Shannon sense.
Caitlin McShea (18m 20s): So you pointed something that I have a curiosity about. It seems to me that you're suggesting that as you witness, or you shoot your laser at a very complex thing, the fact that it's complex also necessarily to something like in abundance. Is that right?
Cole Mathis (18m 35s): Right. So there's this really subtle, maybe not subtle, there's this important caveat in the paper where we say living systems, will create complex molecules in detectable abundance. So the complex molecule I always use is like vitamin B12. And I used that because it took like 91 postdocs and 12 years to do the total synthesis of vitamin B12. So I'm one post-doc. 91 of me over 12 years is unfathomable.
If you could make it on accident, one of those postdocs would have worked it out. But it could be that you could make one molecule vitamin B12 on accident. It's not impossible. At least as we understand the Schrodinger equation and laws of physics, as we know that today, there's nothing that says that that's impossible. So you have to be open to that. But the likelihood that you do that a million times, unless you've again, biases is a probability, is essentially zero or for all practical purposes is zero.
But that doesn't mean that for all things. If you start wondering about things other than molecules, you need to detect a million of them. The example I always think of is like, if I go to Mars and I find a cell phone, I don't need to find like two, because I can be like, well, there's, there's a cell phone. Like I could just open it up and like, oh look, here's two like microchips in here. There's no way these each could have been made. And oh, by the way, these have millions of transistors on them.
And there's no chance that those form randomly. So as things get more complex, the sort of, we think this, this threshold of the abundance that you would need to confirm, like detection should go down, but we haven't totally worked that out yet.
Caitlin McShea (20m 26s): So this is sort of a wiggly question, and I'm not qualified to even ask this from like a computer, but from like a technological sense. But it points to this question I have about like dead versus alive things. Or maybe whether or not this assembly theory could be effectively used for something like the detection of techno signature. So you find a cell phone, it's got thousands of transistors in it. What if you just find the original bell transistor. It did it just three things. It's just like copper, gold and germanium. It seems quite simple. Would you miss it? You would miss it.
Cole Mathis (20m 56s): I think it's possible. I would need to know more about like the material properties of those transistors, but I think you're right. I think it's possible that if you found like very simple transistors, you would just be like, oh, this is just some metal deposit or you might say it's kind of interesting, but it's not very complex. So that's one thing that we are always open to that this method could result in false negatives where we find this super interesting.
Maybe self-replicating like lipid assembly that's just made out of like very, very simple molecules. And that might be super interesting from life detection perspective or like chemical self-organization. But if the molecules are all simple, we might miss it, which we're open to it. I worry about that less with techno signatures. I haven't actually considered, I always think of technic signatures as sort of like the easy case. because if you look at the materials that like material scientists pick-up, those would, you know, those were like off the scale, like super complex, not as complex as some proteins, but the really, really high up there, but yeah.
Transistors from like 50 years ago, maybe.
Caitlin McShea (22m 10s): Yeah. I mean, it was kind of a joke of a question, but I think it points to a larger thing that your paper points out, which I think is really important, this idea of the alive versus dead thing. So if you are trying to detect whether or not there is, or was a living system on another planet, you find something by the way, I'll link the paper in the show notes, but the magic number is 15, right? Basically you draw this threshold at about 15 steps of assembly and everything above. It seems to be alive and everything below. It seems not to be. However, there are things that you ran through that are the consequences of living systems and those don't make it, those don't cross the threshold.
They don't pass the finish line. I think about this because we have all these rovers on Mars and be missions are to determine whether or not there once was life on Mars. They did not that they've been boxed into life. And I think that's really, this is literally a search for living aliens.
Cole Mathis (23m 4s): That's the biggest goal. We have some data that suggests we should be able to recover biosignatures from really ancient material. So some of the samples that Heather sent us were these like paleo mats that were frozen and at Antarctica, and I was shocked that we were able to get anything out of those, but some of those were above the threshold. Heather did the extraction there. So there could have been something where it's like, oh, well I know this will be there. So we might've had some things working in our favor that we wouldn't necessarily have on Mars for the detection there.
But this was one thing we worried about a lot. One of the experiments we did was that we like took bunch of yeast and like burned it in an autoclave. I'm like really quickly, you just destroy any sign that there was ever life there. So I think this is something where we really need to work with biologists and like organic chemists to think about like, how could these sort of degradation pathways manifest and could we put the pieces back together and in a clever way to say like, look, we think there might've been a complex molecule here.
We didn't detect it directly. But like, look at all these pieces. Could we put these back together? And does that tell us that there was a complex molecule here. But yeah, the main goal is living aliens.
Caitlin McShea (24m 21s): So what I ask might sound like a criticism, but actually I think what's so wonderful, what's so magic about this is that we're you defined a complex molecule over 15, it's a smoking gun. And so that's what I think is there's two things about it. One, if you find it, it's a true positive. There's, it's categorically the case. And I love that. And then the second thing is that it demands this notion that there's life everywhere all the time. There's this thought that maybe there were life, there was life on all these other planet that seem no longer hospitable, but it seems like your group assumes that life is happening now, everywhere can be found in our lifetimes.
And I just, I think in terms of being a human being today, if that's true, it's very exciting.
Cole Mathis (25m 3s): It is really, really exciting. And there's lots of places in the solar system that I'm like very, very eager to deploy this. I will say that I think there's still a lot of skepticism in astrobiology community. I think the conventional wisdom right now is that like, there is no single measurement you could make that would indicate that life is there. And obviously I disagree with that. I think we have the data to support it, but I understand the concern people have there because there have been really confusing life detection results.
And it put NASA off of doing life detection experiments for a long time, actually some of the results from the Viking missions. But what I will say is like, I'll go back to the cell phone example. If I find a cell phone on Mars, there's no doubt that life made it. We'll assume like if it's an iPhone that earth like me somehow fell out of the river, but like there's no doubt that life needed it. And so I don't need multiple measurements of like, oh, but where was the factory that made it? Or is there like pollution consistent with iPhone production?
I just am like, look, there's this iPhone. And so in the case of molecules, if I was being very skeptical, I would say, look, you know, mass spectrometry is great, but maybe there's ways you could get fooled. And this detection is kind of tricky and I'm totally open to that. If you want to confirm that there's this complex molecule in multiple ways, that makes perfect sense to me. That's good science, but I don't think that it's like, oh, you need to detect a complex molecule and some genomic system and coding the information for that molecule synthesis.
You found the molecule. Like there's no way that this could have happened without information. And if we find information out outside of earth life that I think we've detected aliens.
Caitlin McShea (26m 54s): So this brings me to a question that I have about a very vague and an interesting sentence that exists in the paper. And you may have already invested at the beginning of this conversation, but I wrote it down because I wanted to make sure I read it correctly. This is when you're describing or defining what the molecular assembly is. And the final sentence of this section reads as follows. If our hypothesis is correct, then life detection experiments based on MNA can indicate the presence of living systems, irrespective of their elemental composition assuming those living systems are based on molecules.
Cole Mathis (27m 24s): So I'm an astrobiologist and the whole goal of sort of thinking about agnostic biosignatures is to think about life that's not like our life. And our life is based on molecules and it's based on a specific subset of molecules. And so what we've done here is said like, look, we can detect complex molecules, but I want to leave this caveat that like, maybe it's possible for aliens to be based on not molecules.
I forget who added that sentence in there. I think I put like a version of it somewhere and then it sort of evolved. But when I was rewriting that I was thinking a lot about this work at fiction actually called Dragon's Eggby Robert Forward. And the premise of that, I'm not giving away anything here is that life or something like life starts on the surface of a neutron star. And so it's based on nuclear interactions that happen tend to the nine times faster than sort of the timescales of chemistry.
And Robert Forward was actually like a neutron star, so there's like some, some hard sci-fi in that book, but also a lot of awesome speculation. And then other people have thought about like, could there be magma zones or something based on like complex interactions in the mantle. And so I I'm pretty convinced any life we detect will be based on molecules, but I dunno, there's always the possibility that we have a very narrow view of where to look for life. And so, that's the meaning of that rather vague sentence, I guess.
Caitlin McShea (29m 2s): It's like a underline agnostic in our approach, but no, I think the reason that I'm asking you about this is because it varied the caveat that perhaps there might be something like an immaterial form of life that how do you equate for complexity? How do you equate for information? Where did the information come from? How is it stored? How do you refer to it? Where is it?
Cole Mathis (29m 21s): Yeah, exactly. So I think that's a good reason to think that all life will be based on molecules because bonds are great places to store information. If you start thinking about like, how could magma store information? They're like, well, maybe we'd these crystals or, yeah, I think a lot of people in the complex systems community often think about like dynamical systems that sort of can store information in a process rather than an object.
But if you're making objects, the simplest objects in the universe are molecules because they're just one step up from atoms and atoms are really constrained. And the nice thing about molecules is they have this huge open combinatorial space. So there's sort of endless possibilities for innovation based on what's available and what's around.
Caitlin McShea (30m 16s): Yeah, I think that's great. I appreciate that this is the other thing about working with broad-minded individuals. It's you can do the good empirical science. You can suggest new methods for detection. You don't necessarily have to agree on how agnostic agnostic is, but you can keep that space open and that's, I've been great. I'm a skeptic, right? I, I believe that life is happening everywhere all the time. Origins of life is my favorite element of research with which I'm involved, but I'm always willing to hold space for any possibility because of the fiction that I occupied. So thank you for taking that on.
Even if it wasn't your sentence.
Cole Mathis (30m 47s): Yeah, no, no. I'm happy to. That's a good one. There's some sentences I'm not excited about it. I was like, oh no, what she's going to, what is she going to throw at me? That's a good one.
Caitlin McShea (30m 56s): That's why I have one more sentence, because I think this sort of underlines the whole point of the project and then we can move to the inverse. There are aliens, but did they leave? But I think the crux behind assembly theory is an attempt to move away from maybe not failed attempts, but short-sighted attempts to detect life in the universe. And what I mean by that is, oh, we'd certainly like water. So let's look for water. And you already talked about this. In reference to ourselves and looking for life that resembles our, as we do have these blinders, but the difference between what your team is doing and what has happened in the past is that you are kind of circumnavigating the need to define life.
And I want you, if you can talk a little bit about why that's so important.
Cole Mathis (31m 38s): Yeah, sure. I'm happy to. So there is a huge debate about definitions of life and whether they're useful or whether one should ever be established. And those have been going on since the sixties and seventies, and they've been varying degrees of passionate and sort of heated over the last few decades. And we wanted to avoid that, not just because we wanted to do something more productive than re-litigating decades old arguments, but because we thought that there was a way to sort of start developing a theory of life not as we know it, but life generally. And that's something that I thought a lot about with Sara when I was doing my PhD. And she's obviously sort of built her career on thinking about how do we develop this theoretical framework to understand the origin of life and astrobiology. And it's very frustrating once you think about that from the perspective of theoretical physics to go into the astrobiology and life detection literature, because as you say, it's like people studying exoplanets are looking for, I mean, people will refer to planets where we think there's liquid water on the surface as habitable.
It boggles the mind. There's so many ways in which that could be habit or an uninhabited and it's difficult notion to pin down and then people will look for things like oxygen because life on earth makes oxygen. But we also know that for huge periods of time on earth, life wasn't making oxygen and it wouldn't have been detectable in the atmosphere. I have a lot of sympathy for people that study exoplanets because like your entire research endeavor is based on like one pixel of data from like many, many light years away.
And there's very limited information you can draw from that. So having targets that at least gets you going is really productive, but we wanted to, instead of like focusing on, what is defining life, focusing on what life does. Because I was working in a chemistry lab, when we were doing this, we focused on what are the consequences of information? So this is sort of the connecting thread through all of this is we have this idea that information is somehow the thing that's unique to life.
And Sara developed that a lot. And we also developed that idea pretty extensively on the experimental side. And so looking for the consequences of information became a way to sort of operationalize this thing that we think is distinctive about life. And instead of getting bogged down in how exactly does life use information or what is exactly the definition of information that's relevant to living systems? We just said, look, you can't make these molecules without information. Living systems are doing that all the time.
Let's go figure out a way to make that a quantitative statement and figure out a way to measure it. And so that was a really big motivation there. I think I'm not doing justice enough to the depth of thought that we had Sara put it into focusing on that, but I'm sure you'll get a chance to talk to them about it as well.
Caitlin McShea (34m 45s): I suspect. And that's been like years in the making we've been talking about this, but the paper only just came out. It took awhile.
Cole Mathis (34m 50s): It took a really long time. It's actually funny because I remember there was a meeting in DC back in 2015 when I was still a graduate student that Sara helped organize. And we met up with Lee the first night we were there and Lee was giving Sara a hard time. He was like, you're saying all these things about information. Tell me what experiments do, what are you on about this moment where he was like, look it's or Sara was like, look, it's just, this really non-trivial trajectory through state space. And I don't know why that was the sentence that made sense to Lee, but I think that sort of clicked.
And then from that, a lot of these conversations started to unfold.
Caitlin McShea (35m 29s): Well, I brought in a very glad that you said it in that way, if that's what got the ball rolling. How shall we move?
Cole Mathis (35m 39s): Well, I'm totally open whichever direction you think.
Caitlin McShea (35m 42s): I mean the segue that I was going to make is actually like a selfish statement about why I like origins of life so much. I'm very interested in the origins of creativity, but I'm not contributing to this research. So I find that if I'm like adjacent to it, I might figure that out. But what I like about assembly is that it sort of demonstrates that fact, like, what is life really good at putting stuff together, like, and remembering things to innovate upon it. And, yeah. So I don't know if you want to take that.
Cole Mathis (36m 7s): That constantly confuses me and makes me excited about this research. Cause I think there's a lot of connections to origin of life research, even though none were made explicitly or not. I definitely agree with your interest in the sort of origin of creativity. The way I think about the origin of life actually is sort of synonymous with like origin of creativity. I use like a little bit of a different language. I often think about it in terms of the origin of knowledge, which is a weird thing.
So it's strange that people, you know, things like humans and societies exist, they're not just subject to the laws of physics and chemistry. They know about laws of physics and chemistry, and they can intervene on those laws and cause new things to happen in the world. And so the example that Sara always gives is like, if you think about the satellites around Earth, without knowledge bearing systems like humans, there's one natural satellite, that's the moon.
But then once you have knowledge bearing systems like society and humans that know about the laws of gravitation and jet propulsion, there's like thousands of artificial satellites that we've put up there. And so it seems really strange that like, whatever it is that we call knowledge has these like really important consequences for the physical structure of the world we live in. And I think assembly theory starts to get at that, that it's like, you know, it's able to capture sort of the number of unit operations or this sort of number of little pieces of knowledge that are required to make an object.
And so that object represents this sort of stored information about what is, and isn't possible and how to mediate transitions between possible states. But that's all very speculative.
Caitlin McShea (38m 2s): No, and I think this is great. So I should say for our audience is the first guests that I've ever brought to Alien Crash Site that I haven't met in three dimensions. So we have the kind of digital rapport, we're two dimensional friendly. And I always ask us to send me some relevant papers. And Cole is also the only person to send me a piece that is extra disciplinary, so to speak. And I think it makes perfect sense because it's all about the role of the artifact and determining whether or not nature is creative or it's humans above nature that are creating with nature, like the collaborative versus kind of way through which art emerges.
And that's great because of course, eventually I'm going to ask you to give me what your alien artifact is in our crash state. But I wonder if in light of that essay, which I will, again, I'll link it to the show notes in case people want to get into it. It seems the key factor of determining whether or not nature or man with nature is the true artist of the world depends upon observation. And so I had to know how to phrase it. It's like, I guess my first question is whether or not observation in and of itself is a creative act.
Cole Mathis (39m 8s): Ooh, that's a good question. I like it. I think so. I think it has to be because there are so many things that you could possibly observe by the time you're making an observation, you've sort of made a value judgment about what's worthy of attention or what's worth like what's noteworthy about the world around you. Maybe there's varying degrees of creativity. And, but, you know, I think it's sort of a creative spark.
So look up at the stars and say, Hey, you know what? There's like a pattern here. I'm going to start recording where these things go, because I think I can uncover the pattern or these balls keep rolling downhill. What's the pattern behind that? Like, I'm going to, I'm going to sort of observe what happens here. So I think so, but, but maybe I have too liberal of a definition of creativity.
Caitlin McShea (40m 3s): I think that's fair. I guess one thing that I was trying to think through is like, let's say I'm a human being, but I'm like very early. I live in, I'm not protected from the coyotes in my home. I'm out with the coyotes and I take a step and I observe a coyote exploit that information to something like selection. I would select to go high or I would select to run. We'll see what happens. Who knows what happens to me? But there is something about observation. Like the thing that's observed seems to me to be something like information and then the use of it, like the exploitation of that information seems to me to be something like selection or creativity, or I don't know, all of these words are very wiggly depending on who's saying them what they mean.
So I wonder if actually the creative part is not the observation, but the articulation of that observation in some way. I don't know.
Cole Mathis (40m 53s): To me, that distinction is the difference between information and knowledge. There's information everywhere sort of, well, I don't know. I have multiple definitions of information, so maybe this is a slightly different.
Caitlin McShea (41m 8s): We’re just going to rewind and watch you contradict yourself.
Cole Mathis (41m 11s): Maybe this is a slightly different meaning of information, but there are sort of signals coming at me from all over the place and I can sort of choose to record them. And then I can turn those signals into knowledge by like identifying the regularities. I seen a bunch of coyotes and I know that if I throw a rocket them bad things happen, but if I throw a piece of steak at them, I can walk away and be fine.
And so now you've got this like knowledge about the way coyotes work, or at least the way coyotes interact with you as an individual. I'm having trouble squaring creativity with this. I do think there are creative steps in there, but I think probably this is my bias as somebody that's a scientist and thinks more about like knowledge and changes in states in the world. And how do we gain knowledge then? What are the creative steps required to make those things happen?
So I sort of deprioritize creativity maybe relative to the way you think about it.
Caitlin McShea (42m 18s): I think that's probably right. I think I'm trying to put a square peg into the round hole of empirical science, just like art, extreme innovation, collaboration, all of it, but that's okay. That's, that's constantly what I'm doing. That's why my podcast is about fiction and it is about science.
Cole Mathis (42m 32s): I mean, I think that's one of the things that's interesting about this essay that I sent you art as a product of nature as a work of art, which is a fabulous title, he starts by saying like it's really trendy to say that art and science have so much in common, but what do people really mean by that? We've got this national science foundation and this National Institute of the Humanities. So we keep these funding sources separate. We keep these people in different buildings at the universities. There's not always the case. I think ASFA is a good example of not doing that, but then he sort of digs into this question of like, what are the consequences of really treating the scientific process as like a work of art and the create the product of scientific output of nature itself as a work of art generated by scientists.
And one of the consequences I think he alludes to is that maybe this seems to deprioritize like the contributions of individuals. But I actually think that like, there's a lot to be said for like creative things happen, not just in individual minds, but like in collectives and sort of in the context in which those minds interact with other ideas. So I always give people, especially Lee, a hard time. It'd be like, there's no such thing as an original idea. There's a bunch of ideas around and people pick them up and experience them differently.
And then they produce things based on those interactions that they have. And the thing that's original is like pushing through that idea to the two it's logical end. But I can contradict myself on that as well.
Caitlin McShea (44m 6s): That's, what's so wonderful about it is that there is, I find myself disagreeing with myself later as I read it, but then eventually you get to look nature as she is in herself. So I might provocatively say to Lee, like, there's no such thing as a controlled experiment, I'd probably get in trouble. But you know, if you think about like what you can actually glean from these things, they're not, they could be removed. There's something to be said about the over and above observation of a system that you've manipulated that isn't nature. It's just a really fun thing to think about, especially in light of an alien visitation. So here we go, 13 years ago, aliens definitely crashed.
We know they exist and not only do they exist, they are intelligent. They can travel great distances and they seem to have a lot of really fascinating technology at their disposal, literally at their disposal so much that they don't even notice that they've left it all behind the goal at the risk of imprisonment, great personal injury, even death, what objects do you hope? Do you uncover it from an alien crash site?
Cole Mathis (44m 59s): So I don't have a good name for this yet, but we can work on it together. But what this object does, it's almost like the shape of like a laser Porter, maybe something like a Bluetooth mouse, not bigger than that. And when you point this object at something at another object, it sort of reflects the light to the other things in the universe that were required in order for that object to exist.
Caitlin McShea (45m 38s): Ah, okay, great. Sorry. I don't mean to laugh. I see it. I could have guessed. I wish I had like the Johnny Carson card, but I could pull out, was going to say something like this.
Cole Mathis (45m 45s): Perfect. I know it's very selfish based on my research interests to wish for an object like this.
Caitlin McShea (45m 51s): So just to re articulate, because I laughed right over you essentially, you point this laser Bluetooth object at another object and suddenly the entire lineage of what the evolutionary processes that led to its existence is suddenly visible to you.
Cole Mathis (46m 7s): So the things that were contingent, things that were required for that object to exist become apparent. And I would use this all over the place. Like I would shine it at life. Obviously I'd like, get E.Coli and be like, what the hell did this come from? But I would also like shine it up mountains and like other planets and stuff, because there's all these questions about like contingent evolution and like earth history and you know, what made our planet habitable in the first place.
And I think more often than not the amount of information would just be like dizzy and overwhelming because if you pointed out E. Coli, it's going to show you like billions of years of like slightly different E. Coli that required for that to exist. Yeah. I don't know what called this thing yet.
Caitlin McShea (46m 53s): I'm not sure either. Let's, let's say the name let's explore the uses and the applications. So, in the book, there is this international institute of extraterrestrial, whatever, and their whole thing is to sort of retro engineer the function of these devices. It seems that well, because of your particular interest, if you were the one to find this object you'd know immediately what it does by shining it upon the first thing you did. And so I wonder if there's immediately the need for us to sort of archive that information for everything. Like suddenly it was a library.
So that's interesting except for I can't imagine that it's complete because you said earlier, you know, we're searching for oxygen because our earth uses oxygen. So does life, but we know for a fact that prior to this kind of particular Precita bacteria, whatever cyanobacteria life oxygen didn't matter to the life that existed prior. So I wonder this, does this device include even the invisible contingencies or how complete is this linear?
Cole Mathis (47m 53s): This is something that I'm not sure. I think if it was complete, it would just be like, it would append to everything that we know. Every scientist would just have to like, stop what they're doing and like reorient their life around like, okay, well we shined it at this. And so now I need to like catalog all of the things. I'm like, try to parse this information into some kind of meaningful theory about how these things exist. But what I was imagining was sort of like, yeah, it sort of highlights the key steps because I think there's a lot of things that happen.
So like if I, if I pointed it out my phone, this is like a pixel four, I probably don't need to know that, like there was a pixel two and a pixel three and a pixel one. But I probably need to know that like, okay, before there were screen phones, there were flip phones. And like, before those that were only landlines on like, actually your phone is more like a computer. So like there were also laptops before that. And so what I think is interesting about this is that so much of the world we existed depends on not just one lineage of things or one lineage of ideas, but the intersection of like many, not just like two or three but thousands.
And I think if you pointed at things like Shakespeare, suddenly you're unpacking this like history of the English language and like what it meant to be a human at the time Shakespeare was alive. And these intricacies of the way plays were performed and the people live, it's headed them and they're like social structure. So I think my biggest concern with this object is that I would be utterly paralyzing where you're just like shown so much information. That's totally invisible to you now, but you'd be forced to confront, oh no, these everything in the world around me has such a complex history.
And I often find myself paralyzed by that anyways. So maybe I would just be comfortable with that, but I think it would be unsettling for a lot of things.
Caitlin McShea (49m 50s): I think that's right. You'd almost be blinded. I mean, I guess you can point to one thing at a time, but even one thing has a nearly infinite
Cole Mathis (49m 58s): You're right. I think he would have to do a lot of like comparing and contrast students, like, okay, I'm going to point this at the star. And it's probably going to light up like this other area of the universe. That's like got a star forming region and there's like some metals there that were formed from supernovas. And like, you'd have to do like comparative analysis to be like, okay, why is this star lighting up this region? But this star isn't and start really sort of weeding out what information it starts to define individuals in the face of like all of this sort of lineage.
Caitlin McShea (50m 36s): So then, here's the, what would you call it? Like the sticker? Here's the obstacle. We were talking about agnosticism in our search for life in the universe. This is not a human made. Like what information inundation, laser or whatever. I don't know. The humans didn't make it. So I have to presume that whatever you're seeing, if you could understand whatever the aliens, what you're seeing is this sort of like logical approach to lineage that the aliens have.
Cole Mathis (50m 60s): And I just don't know, like I didn't consider that. It could be that this, like, whatever the alien culture, if they have something like that or the sort of a pistol biology or the way they organize their thoughts into the technology that they use could be so radically different that it could just seem like a disco light at first. Just like, oh, I shine this laser. And like a bunch of stuff lights up. That's kind of trippy. And it might not give you any insight into, at least immediately that's like obvious that like, oh, this is telling me about technology or it's telling me what's required for this to exist.
This is where I have to be a physicist because there's a lot of different disciplines in astrobiology. And I think one thing that, that people like Sara and people like me have been really pushing on, is there a universal biology. Is there something, are there laws that must be true of all living systems? And I think there has to be for reasons that are sort of related to what I was saying about like changes in the possible states of the universe. But if it's the case that like, actually we basically understand the laws of physics, there's no universal laws of biology.
There's just peculiarities in chemistry that sometimes become, spacefaring just, I think a shocking, maybe astonishing way to think about the world. Then, I don't think we have any chance of understanding the outputs of this device. But if we can understand it, it sort of indicates that there is something universal about systems that have the ability to manipulate information and have knowledge and can build technology. And that at some base level, there is a physical, or at least general principle that explains sort of systems that make technology and systems that manipulate the universe that they're in.
And that's one of the reasons why I kind of have to believe that there's life elsewhere. It would be so depressing if we're just a peculiarity of earth chemistry. It's either the case that we are sort of this grand manifestation of a universal principle of the universe that's like acquiring and learning about itself or just some stuff that copied ourselves and some knock on the surface of the year.
Caitlin McShea (53m 27s): There's like two camps. It's like, oh, we're, we're amazing. We special and rare. And now this other end of two was found. And it's just like, Ugh, but it was, I mean, I had to be excited about it, but so many people would be like terribly, like crippled by that discovery. So it is funny, like how that, what that means to different people. I think what I like about this device, I mean, we already know that the aliens are sophisticated in the sense that they create technology. They can fly, they are space, varying individuals, potentially just the consequences of weird chemistry on their planet, who knows, but they're clearly curious and they're in there investigating in the same way that we are.
And so what I like is that I can't imagine that if you point to a book, let's say Shakespeare, it wouldn't be right. You might point to something that the earth made and nothing would show up because these aliens would have never encountered it to track its lineage. I mean, this is assuming that this is like an alien made archive. It might not be, it might just be some magic machine that shows you the truth of everything.
Cole Mathis (54m 22s): It could be something that really sort of this alien technology has access and is able to uncover sort of pausal lineages automatically which is much more disturbing, I think.
Caitlin McShea (54m 36s): think the object makes perfect sense considering the stalker who found it, but I do think, if it's true that it's this universal revealing thing, we still have to name it. Well, that would be amazing. Especially if we have the wherewithal to recognize it because there's also, it might be universal, but we might not have the lens to read through whatever these universal revelations are because we're not whatever. So we're like, yeah, we're very anthropomorphic.
And also just like personally, our identity is very committed to our ideas often, I just wonder, I wonder how complete or incomplete it would be if it's universal, that'd be great. I don't know. I wonder what can be known and what can't be known. It's a wonderful object. It likes information. It provides more questions than it.
Cole Mathis (55m 29s): Maybe it does by the way, I love the context for this book, because I think thinking about aliens, obviously, maybe it's a self- aggrandizement to say like, thinking about aliens in terms of the artifacts that they produce is the right way to think about aliens. But I do think it's really interesting in the context of the paper, because so much of this like definition of life controversy, that's like dogs, the field in the past has been like, oh, well how will we know life? Would we see it? And you know, can we just hack living metabolism and things like that.
And it's sort of based on this assumption that the thing you're going to get is like a little green man or the E. Coli version of a little green man, like you're going to get the poorer caucus of Mars. But the thing that you're most likely to detect the instruments we make for chemistry detects artifacts, they don't detect dynamics. So like you and I are sort of like interacting in a dynamic way and I've totally sold that like life is largely defined by its sort of dynamical processes. And I think that led a lot of people to deprioritize the idea that you will find physical objects that will tell you life was there.
And they thought that there would need to be some sort of signature of this dynamical process. But sort of what we're saying in this paper is actually the artifacts that are left are the signatures of that dynamical process. And it's super obvious in the context of this book. Like these things just sort of came through and this is the stuff that they left behind, that it would care about. It's going to be the same thing. Like I don't care if you detect the E. Coli or the ATP that my cells are using to run things. It's no consequence of me that, that sort of fell off of my body.
It was detected by some instrument. I mean, in the books, the artifacts are like very interesting, but that's for like social reasons and like to do with the way that civilization is structured. There's no doubt that what has been discovered is aliens. It's not like, oh, this is like a mysterious manifestation of our geochemistry or our soul, our interaction in the solar system with the sun, we've got to explain this physical phenomenon. It's like, no, these artifacts are nuts. They're clearly alien technology. And it's the same thing with molecular assemblies.
This molecule has bananas. This is clearly like an alien made. So I think this is, yeah, I was really excited. I had never heard of this book or the movie before. And I was really excited. I was like, oh, this is perfect.
Caitlin McShea (57m 51s): I'm so glad you took the time with it. I'm constantly rereading it just to make sure because I want to be able to approach it from the perspective of the person that I'm speaking with. And so I read it occasionally and new things emerge and what I came upon this time thinking about, okay, is he going to pick something that's molecular? Or is it going to pick something that sort of technological? And I would have guessed that I wouldn't get. I wouldn't get something with a laser, but there is this moment where red is in the zone with someone and he steps into a hell slime, which is just like a muck. Like it's just, it's not something that you can pick up and utilize like a device.
But you can imagine that if like that existed on a planet and your mass spec found it and it might be a complex molecular assembly and how intriguing even if terrifying and you don't want to pick it up and take it with you, but it points to something like life. And that's, even if it's not something that you can hold and utilize, it's something that life held and utilized. It's something that like produce.
Cole Mathis (58m 46s): My one reservation about the device that I said was, I was like thinking about the book. I was like, man, that sounds like a really powerful thing that wouldn't be left behind. And there are other, like, really powerful artifacts that are left behind, but I wanted to think of something that was like more like just trash, but also really interesting. And to me, the health slime is like an example of that. It's not worth it. Like I'm not going to carry that out with me, but maybe this is my naive human brain. Just being too excited to know about the contingent history of everything from like, man, this seems like a weird thing to leave behind, or it boggles the mind to think of a technology where that is as useful as a spark plug, right.
Just like, yeah, whatever. Like, we'll just throw this in the trash here.
Caitlin McShea (59m 32s): Well, let me push you a little bit on that because you are the man that earlier use the example of stumbling upon an iPhone on Mars. Whoever lost a phone. I certainly have.
Cole Mathis (59m 41s): I have actually I lost my, this is totally tangential. I lost my phone and wallet outside of a Ranger station in port Angeles, Washington on the way to the Olympic National Park and by the kindness of a stranger, I didn't get my phone back. I got my wallet back in London three weeks later.
Caitlin McShea (1h 0m 9s): Life emerges. Life creates really like robust systems of transportation and there's this like full soul that's shared across the planet. And while it's get returned that I'm really glad that you told that story just because it makes me very happy and hopefully our listeners too, but there's something to be said about the sophisticated level of these aliens, that they have so much technology and they're so capable of producing novel innovation that if they go to a bar and leave their phone behind, it's just like, damn, at least I got the warranty. I'll get it. It's not preposterous that you would stumble upon this.
If these people were just taking these people, these aliens were just taking a break on their way to some cooler destination. It's their internet. It's just that their internet is more complete than ours. You have a name having conversed. You have an idea.
Cole Mathis (1h 0m 55s): No, not yet. I'm terrible at naming things.
Caitlin McShea (1h 0m 59s): Maybe can can use an opportunity to solicit suggestions for the devices.
Cole Mathis (1h 1m 2s): Yeah. That's actually a funny thing about the papers. We kept changing the name, halfway complexity and then pathway assembly. And then it was molecular assembly. At some point I was just like, I don't care anymore. Leave just like tell me what to put in the paper so that I can say one thing.
Caitlin McShea (1h 1m 21s): That's good. It's better than like assembly face, make assembly face. That's great. Well, thank you. This this has been fun. One. I have a much more illuminated perspective on the work that you guys have been doing. I think that I've said it before. I've said it directly to Sara and we, I think that assembly is really, really clever again, because it provides us with this alien smoking gun that I've been after for as long as I've started thinking about after biology and life of the universe. So thank you for all of that work and for coming and explaining it to me.
Cole Mathis (1h 1m 51s): I'm glad it's been exciting and interesting for you to read about and it's been really exciting to work on. This conversation has been awesome. I've been really, like I said, this the sort of the framing of this podcast and this work have a lot of overlap and it's really, really cool.
Caitlin McShea (1h 2m 4s): Yeah. And I think it's, it's interesting to see you wouldn't expect that there would be overlap between something so kind of fun spectrum and like low stakes and something that is so empirically clever and technologically savvy with a proposal for precisely how to employ this system, because that's what's so cool about the paper too. It's not just, this could work it's this could work. Oh, this does work. Oh, this is how you do it so well then you, and thank you for spending your hour with me.
Cole Mathis (1h 2m 30s): Of course. It's been a blast. This project was really exciting because of exactly what you said, driving these ideas through all the way is something that is really hard. And these really good ads, it's pretty exhilarating working in the lab with so much support, but being like, no, like we're going to take this another step every time we got something. And I was like, so we're going to write the paper yet. And he was like, no, we're going to go do this.
Caitlin McShea (1h 2m 55s): Are you stepping away from that? I think you said, you know, in working with Sara and Chris and SFI and now NASA, are you kind of, it seems like you're settling more into the theoretical side of things. Are you going to have experimental stuff?
Cole Mathis (1h 3m 6s): So I'm going to keep collaborating with Lee probably obviously to a lesser extent because I won't be in Glasgow and like working directly with everyone in the lab, but there's a few projects that are ongoing and the stuff I'm doing with Sara and with Chris is on molecular assembly. So he'll be involved to some, some degree as part of my sort of goal with my career is trying to drive empiricism in theory. And do each other in astrobiology because they're usually like living in separate worlds, especially when it comes to the origin of life.
So a lot of what I spend my time doing is look, there's million models we could cook up. So think about the origin of life and there's a million experiments we can do. Can we use those two sets of infinite things to like overlap and figure out what are the most important ones we can do now? So I'm sure I'll be working with Lee more and there's specific people in his lab that I'm going to be working with a lot as well because his lab is giant. There's like 50 people there.
Caitlin McShea (1h 4m 1s): It’s bigger than the Santa Fe Institute.
Cole Mathis (1h 4m 3s): It is. Yeah. It's a sight to behold when it's a full swing.
Caitlin McShea (1h 4m 8s): I can't imagine what it looks like. The actual energy, all of the robo chemists. I have no idea.
Cole Mathis (1h 4m 14s): Yeah. It's pretty cool. Just walking around and seeing robots doing experiments all the time.
Caitlin McShea (1h 4m 18s): Great. Well, I'm good. I'm glad that you're continuing on with that. There might be one last question. And then we're gone, speaking of space exploration, where do you want to go with this tool? Where are you most excited or what is your hypothesis? What is the best destination?
Cole Mathis (1h 4m 30s): So my usual answer to this is Titan. And the reason Titan is because it is the only place in the solar system with beaches besides earth, as far as we know. The sand is ice, water, ice, and the water is I think it's liquid methane. So it's very different from the beaches. But what you have is three phase sort of equilibrium where you've got a gas, liquid and a solid all in contact with each other. I think that can just create a lot of interesting interfaces that could lead to interesting chemical self-organization.
Recently I'm super excited that we're going to Venus or well, I'm not going NASA is going to Venus. And the reason is I think that astrobiology needs to be able to explain why earth and Venus are so different, right? If the whole endeavor or at least planetary sciences. The whole endeavor of astrobiology right now is stuck on that. We only have earth life, but we've got like a near identical copy of earth right next to us.
And we don't think there's life there. Or, I mean, I guess it depends on who you ask. I don't think there's life there. Phosphine might be interesting. It might not, but we at least don't think it's habit to earth life and its conditions are so different. We need to be able to explain why those differences exist. And there's a lot of interesting questions about whether or not life is the reason earth and Venus are so different. So a lot of people think like, oh, Venus is uninhabitable because it's so hot and it's got this like massive CO2 atmosphere and it's raining acid all the time.
And I mean we know from what we're doing to the planet, that we could send earth into a runaway greenhouse. So why Venus and not Earth? Is it just chance or was it not like actually the establishment of a biosphere on the planet stabilize some of these cycles that prevented earth from going into a runaway greenhouse or to like an ice planet. And so that's really speculative, but I'm massively in favor of all missions to Venus because we haven't gone there really at all. And it's the closest thing to a replicate experiment of earth that we have.
So if, if life is really a planetary process, we need to be able to understand why our closest possible analog doesn't appear to have anything close to earth life on it. I was radicalized in grad school. Wait a minute, what, why are we sending more missions to Mars? Like Mars is great, but like, what's going on with Venus? We haven't sent anything there since eighties. And it also, I think just pushes our creativity in different ways. So like some of the Soviet missions to Venus use like balsa wood to reduce the weight. When you think like, well, that's crazy. Why would you put balsa wood in like a Lander, but there's no oxygen.
So it can't burn. So it's just like, it's the specs just right. Yeah. So, so yeah, I think like stuff like that, just the engineering challenge of going there, I think will be really exciting for a lot of people.
Caitlin McShea (1h 7m 31s): It's a fun puzzle. Venus seems like a window to the past and Mars seems like a window to the future. Not for future life, except for the stuff that we bring in a patch plan. But yeah, Venus seems to have a little more information. Interesting information.
Cole Mathis (1h 7m 46s): At the very least I think, it would be interesting to trap a planetary scientist in a room and be like, explain yourself, like why have we spent so much time on Mars and relatively so little time on Venus, but I think maybe the exoplanet revolution sort of the amount of data we had really changed what we thought was a priority because there was tons of things about like geology and stuff that we just didn't think were possible. And then we started detecting all these exoplanets like, oh yeah, no, you can't do that. Just not on Earth.
Caitlin McShea (1h 8m 14s): There's tons of innovation made in technology that allow us to detect things now that we weren't able to detect back then when we ruled things out, when we went to other places. Redundancy isn't all that bad.
Cole Mathis (1h 8m 25s): No, no, that's great.
Caitlin McShea (1h 8m 26s): Well, it's nice to have two dimensionally meet you. If you do make it to Santa Fe the summer we'll get together. You can explain the paper process over a beer.
Cole Mathis (1h 8m 33s): Yeah, that sounds good. There's a lot of, a lot of little interesting pieces of information there. Yeah.
Caitlin McShea (1h 8m 39s): Behind the scenes, the scientific publishing ladies, gentlemen,
Cole Mathis (1h 8m 43s): The manuscript itself has a very high assembly number, affects the number of operations in the editorial process.
Caitlin McShea (1h 8m 49s): Definitely. That's perfect. Awesome. I look forward to it. Well, thank you, Cole. Thank you.