Tesla Bots on Mars, Tidally Locked Earth 2.0, Where Life Came From | Q&A 284

The Vera Rubin observatory will capture the southern night sky? Are there any plans for something similar in the northern hemisphere?

Ok Fraser predictions 1 ISS will suffer a moderate leak, but it will be fixed 2 Artemis 3 will be push ed back to 2028 3 Starship and SuperHeavy will both be caught, 4 There will not be a daylight comet in 2025 5 New Glenn will launch, but not be landed on the landing barge

My prediction for 2025: the galactic federation of planets will reveal themselves, depose extremists and narcisists, elimininate poverty, hunger, suffering and discrimination. Ok it may be just a hope, not a prediction.

Even if we discover how life first started on earth, we'll still be dealing with a single instantiation that will not necessarily be a useful guide for searching elsewhere. We have good molecular chemistry reasons for thinking that life anywhere will likely be carbon-based and also that liquid water is a very good substrate for facilitating durable molecular interactions. These are not necessarily true, but it's a reasonable starting point. Beyond that, however, the possibility space of chemical structures in the universe is nearly infinite, and the subsequent possibility space of biochemistry is also incredibly large. "Assembly Theory" is a relatively new field that has a definition for life that could prove useful for exploring the ways in which life can first develop, and also finding life beyond earth in a way that doesn't rely on traditional biosignatures. It goes something like this: a planet exploring small molecule chemistry--as any planet will naturally do via random molecular interactions--has a boundary, a threshold of complexity above which you should never expect to see those molecules in abundance unless they're the product of evolution and selection. On earth, it appears that only life can produce molecules above 15 assembly steps. Statistically, this boundary will likely prove true elsewhere also, even if the underlying biochemistry of life is different. Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Welker has written about her team's extensive work on assembly theory. She would be a great guest to interview!