106 | Stuart Bartlett on What "Life" Means

Someday, most likely, we will encounter life that is not as we know it. We might find it elsewhere in the universe, we might find it right here on Earth, or we might make it ourselves in a lab. Will we know it when we see it? "Life" isn't a simple unified concept, but rather a collection of a number of life-like properties. I talk with astrobiologist Stuart Bartlett, who (in collaboration with Michael Wong) has proposed a new way of thinking about life based on four pillars: dissipation, autocatalysis, homeostasis, and learning. Their framework may or may not become the standard picture, but it provides a useful way of thinking about what we expect life to be.

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Stuart Bartlett received his Ph.D. in complex systems from the University of Southampton. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech, and was formerly a postdoc at the Earth Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.


Episoder(419)

269 | Sahar Heydari Fard on Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics

269 | Sahar Heydari Fard on Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics

When it comes to social change, two questions immediately present themselves: What kind of change do we want to see happen? And, how do we bring it about? These questions are distinct but related; the...

18 Mar 20241h 11min

AMA | March 2024

AMA | March 2024

Welcome to the March 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patre...

11 Mar 20243h 55min

268 | Matt Strassler on Relativity, Fields, and the Language of Reality

268 | Matt Strassler on Relativity, Fields, and the Language of Reality

In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell argued that light was a wave of electric and magnetic fields. But it took over four decades for physicists to put together the theory of special relativity, which cor...

4 Mar 20241h 30min

267 | Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and Utopia

267 | Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and Utopia

The twentieth century was something, wasn't it? Margaret Mead, as well as her onetime-husband Gregory Bateson, managed to play roles in several of its key developments: social anthropology and its imp...

26 Feb 20241h 13min

266 | Christoph Adami on How Information Makes Sense of Biology

266 | Christoph Adami on How Information Makes Sense of Biology

Evolution is sometimes described -- not precisely, but with some justification -- as being about the "survival of the fittest." But that idea doesn't work unless there is some way for one generation t...

19 Feb 20241h 20min

AMA | February 2024

AMA | February 2024

Welcome to the February 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

12 Feb 20243h 24min

265 | John Skrentny on How the Economy Mistreats STEM Workers

265 | John Skrentny on How the Economy Mistreats STEM Workers

Universities and their students are constantly being encouraged to produce more graduates majoring in STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That's the kind of training that...

5 Feb 20241h 20min

264 | Sabine Stanley on What's Inside Planets

264 | Sabine Stanley on What's Inside Planets

The radius of the Earth is over 6,000 kilometers, but the deepest we've ever dug below the surface is only about 12 km. Yet we have a quite reliable idea of the structure of the Earth's interior -- in...

29 Jan 20241h 12min

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