How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

19:33Prime Day is June 23rd through the 26th. These deals are so appealing like portable steamers for steaming. Whoa, did I just sing soprano? I think I'm breaking into song. Epic deals on air fryers, Packers, vacuums, and skincare. I can't stop saying... Shop Epic Deals this Prime Day, June 23rd through the 26th. Ooh, I think that's it. Nope, there's more. Luggage, smart glasses. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

20:18I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com. I'm Joel Cherico, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:So what's the value of you fixing nitrogen artificially if it's not what nature does? I'm so glad you asked this question. So this goes back to survival of life, right? Okay. Chuck. Yeah. That's not what we had an argument before this whole show started. It wasn't really an argument. Don't bring your arguments from outside the show into the show. Well, no. Keep the arguments in the street. Listen, I left my argument in the street. She just bought it into this room. Okay, what was the argument? Well, no, the argument I said, she made a very biologist statement. What was that? Life is about survival.

21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:And I made a very philosophical statement. Which was? That is wrong. Okay, let's get to the bottom of it. Go. Life is about survival. And it is about how the biological systems find ways to make it, basically, through the good and the bad. And I think there's a big inspiration out of this. It's not something that I'm afraid of facing, Chuck. that life finds a way. And it is through most of the time overcoming these insane challenges by coming up with very insane responses. So it doesn't, you know how we are told that in the face of conflict, like find some corner, maybe be quiet, be political.

22:03Life doesn't do that. It's you punch it, it punches back, right? So now there's oxygen in the planet. We are two billion years in and nitrogen fixation has evolved. But guess what? This enzyme, this whole biological system hates oxygen. All right, what do I do now? There's all this oxygen in the environment, and I don't like oxygen, so how do I survive? It finds ways, we don't know exactly how and what, to protect itself from the dangers of nitrogen. It protected nitrogen fixations.

22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:So we created animals that thrive on oxygen. Oh, that is way... That's way down the line. Way down, like there's another like two billion years until we get there. Oh, wow. Yeah, there's another billionaire folio-cario. There's another, if some biologists are listening to me, they may be like, Like, how about all the heterocysts and all the systems that protect nitrogen organelles, blah, blah, blah. They were also later. All right. So we want to understand how nitrogen fixation survived oxidation. How did such dangerous thing manage to not kill this biological system? Because oxygen is highly caustic to so many things.

23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:So when you created an ancient enzyme, was that a nitrogen-fixing enzyme? In this particular case, it is a nitrogen-fixing enzyme. We did this for carbon. We did this for informatics, for genetic, more replication system as well. But in this particular case, it is a nitrogen system. So going back to your original question, if this is so costly and we need all these fertilizers, what we are trying to do is not to reinvent a new agriculture, but maybe decrease our dependence on this energetically, globally, very demanding productions. We need better biological solutions. To create fertilizer for plants.

23:38Well, it wouldn't be for fertilizer, but to create more efficient nitrogen fixation would be the opposite thing to maybe lessen our dependence on fertilizers.

23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, got it, got it. So this is a beautiful example, in my very biased opinion, of how astrobiology and studying life in the universe by starting from here, our own place and our own past can actually help our future. If we understand that how these essential systems made it thus far, we may be able to re-engineer them and repurpose them for better efficiency. Because our planet has gone through a lot. It's gone through many ups and downs. And we should not treat past as some useless waste because of our understanding, maybe limited understanding of evolution. We think that if something didn't make it, it was failure.

24:23But there are many reasons for an organism to just not make it.

24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:To not thrive anymore. for no fault of nothing to their own. Exactly. Like T-Rex just got unlucky. I mean, also, they were not that bright, I think. I'm sorry about it. If any T-Rex is watching this, don't come hate me. If the asteroid didn't take them out, there's no reason why T-Rex wouldn't still be outside the door. Well, they didn't have a planetary protection program. I know. Yeah, yeah. Right. Well, if intelligence is a prerequisite for survival, I got news for you people. We're all screwed. Okay? I don't want to put words in your mouth. You're exploring all the ways life has attempted to survive on the possibility or the likelihood that learning what those are could help us today.

25:07Exactly. This is not where it started, I'll be very honest. We just had this very basic curiosity about very basic processes of how and why and how did things evolve. We don't have any understanding of any protein or any metabolism. How did they evolve at first place? I mean, think about that. Tell me any protein you love and I'll tell you, we have no idea how it originated on this planet. And that's a huge knowledge gap. But these questions inevitably led us to understand, create a new paradigm between the planet and microbiology, which I like to refer to as planetary microbiology. How does the microbe and bacteria and eukaryotes, how do they dance with the planet?

25:43Biology needs to completely transform itself and really evaluate molecules and cells and organisms from the perspective of the planet. We need to understand the planetary boundaries that constrain life in order to understand and maybe create a better future for ourselves as well because we rely on these organisms.

26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:Remind us what a eukaryote is. You said that very quickly in a sentence. How do I begin to explain myself?

26:09Well, in my very biased opinion, it's a bacteria that escaped the metabolic trap and bacteria that got very, very lazy. It's basically, I would say, the next points in evolution. They are about 1.8 billion years old. They have more organelles, more complexity. They are our ancestor. And so our ancestors are 1.8 billion years old. We are eukaryotes. Plants are eukaryotes.

26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson:So they have a cell nucleus? They have a nucleus. They have more complex organelles. So there's more going on. More going on, exactly. There's a lot more going on. And they're more lazy. I mean, in general, life is lazy. It will always choose the laziest option. Take a look at cats and dogs at home. I think dogs sleep 20 hours a day. That's called smart. That's all. They're looking at us like - They're not happy when you should get home, but they sleep the whole rest of the day. Well, that's why they jump up and down and they're just like, all right, I'm tired. Seeing you just really exhausted me.

27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:I gotta go eat and then go back to sleep. Let's pivot to what we now think of as extremophiles. This has arisen in astrobiology as if life on Earth can thrive in exotic environments that might otherwise kill us, let's look in the universe at the exotic environments. It might help us think about ways of being alive that are not otherwise the 72-degree tide pool where, as someone had said in generations past. So tell me about how this plays into thinking about extremophiles. Well, I don't think there's any corner on this planet that was not taken over or occupied by life at any point. There's no such thing as non-living on this planet.

27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:Everywhere. Everywhere. And thanks to NASA and the Astrobiology Program and their vision, I think decades ago, the understanding that we need to drill, we need to go to caves, we need to look into ice, we need to go all these crazy places where we think it's completely barren of life, because guess what? Under every rock we find life. And now we call them extremophiles, but if you think about it, it's a bit of an outdated term I think because it is extreme I mean it's very relative it's not extreme for them what is it that they found underwater eruptions of volcanoes where it's highly toxic water is extremely hot and I forget the microorganisms that they found living there and they're doing just fine someone's waste is someone's food this planet wastes nothing Nothing goes to waste.

28:44And that's the beauty of all these organisms that sort of depend on each other. They cheat. They compete. They cooperate. But they find a way to survive. They find a way to make it. It finds a way.

28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:Pitola is loving every time she can say survive to me. So I like the idea that the word extremophile might be outdated. Outdated, yeah. I love that. Yeah. Because— It's just life. It's just life. It's just life. It's not extreme life. It's not the X games. It's just life. It's extreme to us, you know, but it's all, again, coming from our sort of what is it. They would call us extremophiles. Absolutely. Life does many, many weird things, and it will not waste anything. It will eat the sunlight. It will eat acids. It will eat, you know, whatever. It will find a way, and that's thanks to metabolism and all the, you know, what is that nice saying, life is an electron looking for a place to rest.

29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, wait, how much of a saying is that?

29:48I'm just an electron looking for a place to rest. They should be saying that. I'm just an electron looking for a place to rest.

29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. No, I'm just a neutron trying to buy a drink and the bartender says, for you, no charge. No charge.

30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:The ones we're doing, getting particle physics jokes. Was that too much biology for you already? I'm sorry. Excuse me. You have to escape hatch just for a thing to come back in. So remind us what precisely an enzyme does in a chemical reaction. Well, it does lower the thermodynamic barrier to speed up reactions. Oh, so we have reactions that might eventually happen, but you put in another chemical that brings them together. Exactly. So these are the biologist's best friend and the chemist's best friend. Or reversed enemy, depending on what you study, right? And they're all protein. They're micro molecules.

30:47I love that you call them chemicals. It's true. Life is chemistry with memory, right? Everything's chemical. Some of my best friends are made of chemicals.

30:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:Exactly. That's so funny. It's like when people say on a package, they're like, and it's chemical free. And I'm like, you're an idiot. There's no such thing as chemical free. Okay, sorry. They're also chemical. An ugly bag of mostly chemistry. I have to square a circle here from what you've said. We talk about life as thriving on Earth, but so much of it was highly contingent on singularities of geologic, biologic, chemical phenomena in the history. So you could just remove one of those singularities and life is gone. Yeah, yes, it's true. So the contingency of life feels almost preordained. Yes.

31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:Or could it be, based on what you just said, that we don't know how many other attempts have been made that just did not work and this is where we are? Or how many other singular moments could have happened. Could have happened. That did not happen. That did not happen. Or happened but were erased and we can't access. Oh, right. Okay. There are three possibilities. Can you just reflect on the statistics of that? Well, I want to tell you first that what you said is very fundamental because we think about past as some sort of foundation to our existence. We imagine like everything built on top of each other and we stand on these solid grounds.

32:31Right. Newsflash, no. Okay. You can imagine it's more like columns, right? And you remove one column, the building collapses. That's our past. So we've got to be very careful about how much we rely on these biological phenomenon, thinking that we are in good hands. I mean, Earth, it took a really long time for what we depend on to evolve and to find its place. And it is not a foundation whatsoever. These are very delicate systems. You change the pH of a soil, you threaten biological nitrogen fixation.

32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:So here's where I would push back. yes it's delicate for what it is but you take away that pivot point you take away this singularity and a whole other system might have come up where we might be 10 times smarter than we are as humans no this won't happen i mean if you remove carbon fixation we won't even have time to come up with a better solution i'm first i mean if you're thinking about human perspective we're vanished first. Right? We are the first ones to go by now. So some other species rises up. Microbes. They will be okay, obviously. They're going to be fine. There won't be any humans to study them, but they will be doing fantastic things.

33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:Thank God they're gone. Are you suggesting, because we went so long without oxygen and all these life forms thriving in a carbon dioxide atmosphere or whatever. Microbial systems. You're saying without oxygen, that could be a five billion year planet of just microbes? Yeah, it will be most likely. And eukaryotes, but they're also microbial. Are you not gonna make the complex life? It depends on how we define complexity. I don't know if consciousness would still evolve, but the chances of a human evolving again, I don't know. That's a very good question, but animals in general - Some other life form that gets - I was gonna say everything has evolved.

34:15We are extremely fragile. I mean, isn't that true?

34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:Everything has evolved to where we are right now. Everything, so it doesn't make a difference. I wish I could see the future. It would make my life much easier, especially because I study evolution, but there's no way to predict these things. What we can do, again, statistics, calculate to what degree we know the greenhouse gases will be messed up with the rapid changes that we are introducing and to what degree life can keep up with this or not. If you use models to back predict... Can't you use it for future? Why can't you use it to forward predict? It's a complex system. That's how they do climate.

34:46Well, they do to some degree. We always talk about we need better models, but it's a model at the end of today and life will trick you. Life will do things that you're not expecting. That you're not expecting. It's a complex system. Gotcha. Now, going back to the singularities again, I think you remove one, you remove nitrogen fixation, half the world population starves. That's a big number, biological nitrogen fixation. If we're solely dependent on artificial generation of nitrogen, that's the number, half the population of the world. So these are, you know, big numbers and our sustenance rely on these innovations.

35:19The oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, right? Everything depends on these things. Now, going back to the singularities, I do believe and I want to believe that there's more out there about our past that we simply cannot track. I mean, you can think of it as similar to resurrecting an ancient language, right? Egyptian language. How do we do this? We are lucky because we found Rosetta Stone. We could cross compare some notes and we can infer an ancient language and suddenly everything made sense and culturally we understand. So whatever we can recover, we attribute the entire world history to that.

35:53It's the same thing as what we do when it comes to biology. Whatever we recover, we can attribute the past to that. And I think that's overwhelming to think about, but also extremely motivational and inspirational. That we may be completely wrong about our own past in terms of life and its history. And this is extremely important that we understand where we came from. I mean, don't you want to know your ancestors? You do, right? It's the ultimate -

36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:If there are anything like me, then no. I had a friend who said, I want to explore my roots and all I dug up was dirt. Everybody, right? It's going to Greece and, you know, not reading about the Greek history, but just, you know, like skipping the museum and hitting the beach right away and not being curious about anything that made that culture possible. So I want to take on your point. That makes sense. There are people who like to think, and some of this just flows through your work, that there's this process, there's this stable phenomenon, and then something happens, and then something else happens, and there are these checkpoints, right?

36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then at the end, we exist as conscious entities. All right. And if you change any one of these points, then we don't exist. I don't have a problem with that. However, where is your latitude to ask if something else happened, then something else would exist, making a life form vastly smarter than humans or some other thing? What is the range of possibilities rather than focus on the one that worked? How about all the others that could have worked but just didn't have the occasion to do so and could have had a way more advanced civilization than we have today? That's always a possible. There's always worse.

37:36There's always better, right? Like so we don't know. I think – so you need to clarify this for me because I don't know what you mean by – I guess what bothers me is this understanding that life finds a way can be dangerous a little bit because we assume that everything's going to be fine because evolution has been doing its thing for billions of years. Yeah. And even if we mess up, things will be okay.

37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:Life finds a way to produce some kind of life. Okay. That's really what I'm saying. Nothing's going to make us. No, we're, no. You know, any break in the branch in our ancestral tree, we don't exist. All right. But whole other vertebrates will exist. Yes. You know. Yeah. And dinosaurs are around for hundreds of millions of years, far longer than Homo sapiens have been around. So as far as they're concerned, they're quite successful. Yes. They didn't have a space program. If they had, they would have deflected that asteroid, you know. Oh, yes. Without a doubt. I want to keep open the possibility.

38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:We need not be the pinnacle of this evolutionary path. I agree with that. That other evolutionary paths might have been differently fertile, but had a different kind of Earth. with different life forms. That's very true. And I think this whole earlier depiction of evolution, like from monkeys to humans, like maybe drew that picture in our minds that we think there's some direction to evolution. There's no direction at all. So we think A became B, B became C, C became D, and now Boop, B appeared. And like I said, everything has evolved. Everything that's here now evolved. And we still have, based on what you just said, we still do have dinosaurs.

39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:They're called birds. So... That's what I'm saying. That's their evolution. I want to add something to something you said earlier. Earlier on, we mentioned, well, how long did it take life to show up on Earth? Because Earth formed in the void, and it's a hot thing. So, life came around even faster than that because we have a period in the early Earth, what we call the period of heavy bombardment, where the solar system is vacuuming up. The remnants. I know where this is going. Okay, so we're being pummeled. Pummeled. Because there's still a lot of trash out there floating around. Correct, correct.

39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:We're being pummeled. So the official word would be, we're still accreting leftovers from the early solar system. My point is, you can take a thermometric measure of Earth, and Earth is way hotter than what would sustain complex molecules. So you wait for that to cool down. Then you start the clock. If you do that, then life started here within one or 200 million years, not 500 million years. Faster than even, you don't start it when Earth began. You started when Earth could have possibly sustained a complex molecule. Supported life. Doesn't it help you out? I mean, sure. I think I was referring to what we can track in the rock record, right?

40:33Using the isotopes and that. So we're really referring to some cell that already was doing its thing. I am not sure to what degree, like based on our understanding of chemistry, yes, we do need some optimum temperature for certain complexity to emerge. But there's no reason for, again, early chemistry to also evolve from simplicity to chemistry. Chemistry can give rise to more complexity gives rise to more complexity. Mahina ex-mahina, right? Like you can have that original messiness. And out of that messy chemistry, there's more messy things that came out.

41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:So you're saying that the noise that is in the very beginning is part of the process itself or could be part of the process. I think so, but I think what Neil is pointing out is that what we think as life is different than life circa 100 million years past Earth's formation, right? But we think in biology at least, or at least when we think about the last universal common ancestor, that's already a fully fledged, can eat, can poop, has all the genetics and doing its thing, organism. Sure. But origin of life is different than that, right? So origin of life could be a complete chemical system that can maintain itself and do its thing.

41:39So there's likely some theory.

41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm just saying that when you start the clock, you don't have to start it at the formation of Earth. That's all I'm saying. You're saying start it at the place where it could happen. Where it could be sustained. Where it could be sustained. Exactly. That's really all I'm saying there. So what was the thing that you guys found in your field that is the earliest form of an organism? Well, in biological terms, it is four billion years. That's the latest time for this ancestor. That's the last universal common ancestor, Luca. So that's the first organism. But keep in mind, we use what we refer to as phylogenetics, these trees, tree of life.

42:18Obviously, there is no tree of life. It's our romanticized view of life that we collect everything. We draw off trees and we imagine everyone.

42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:You tell me there's no tree of life? It's a thing. Tell me that. But it helps, right? I like trees of life. Biologists like metaphors. Who take that from me? I will take it. And I study trees of life. I will leave this room with the tree. You are cold-blooded, man. You are cold-blooded. I'll take it. I would like you to read me a bedtime story. Where does the tree of life analogy fail? Because it doesn't really factor into the genetic exchange between organisms. and I think it creates this understanding. It implies a certain purity of path. Yes, it gives this direction again, time arrow, time zero.

43:08Then it is likely more web network rather than past tomorrow and Wednesday. I'll give you that. So it's more of a web than a tree. Absolutely. But it helps us, of course, because we understand time, we need to. But it is important that we acknowledge that we made that up. We just use that as a way to make sense of everything. Make it easier to understand.

43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:Exactly. That's all. So I want to bring some physics into this, if I may. So. Uh-oh. Look at me like that. You made him uncomfortable. No, no. You were just like, there's too much day in biology. We're gonna get back to something. Let's bring some physics into this. I mean, if you made a pie chart of this show, it's probably like, what's the biology percentage? We try to get some good biology on here. We don't mind. We can have some physics, Neil. Okay, let me just stir some physics into this. If we were to define life in some way that might also apply on another planet, one of the concepts is metabolism.

44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:That the life absorbs, by whatever means, energy from its environment and uses that for its own survival and possibly reproduction. So how much do you guys think about metabolism when you think about life? Oh, all the time. All the time. It's the engine. We take metabolism. I mean, it's just. Okay, here's something else we think about. If an entire system is exactly at the same temperature, then you can't have a process take place. Because a process takes energy over here and puts it over there. And in order for that to be the case, it's got to be like hotter over here than over there or things have to be moving over here more than they're moving over here.

44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:So when biologists explore the world and think about life, do you also think about energy gradients from one section of an environment to another? For sure. So first of all, I mean, I'm a weird biologist because I'm interested in astrobiology. No, that's the best kind of biologist. Go on. But that still makes it weird. That doesn't get in the way. So I think about the planet all the time. But for sure, biologists think about the ladder in which donor and an acceptor and how they relate to one another. What gives, what takes, and what kind of voltage can be generated in exchange of electrons or materials, in terms of electrons, I guess, between the two ends of the optimum.

45:34So absolutely. Because as I said, life is an electron looking for a place to rest. And it is all about precise channelization of these electrons.

45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, because if all electrons are already resting, nothing happens. Exactly. So you need a receiver. You need that push and pull. And you need that tension. And you need that fight between these systems so that you create energy and you channel that. And you basically channelize that energy across enzymes or whatever is in the cell so that they bounce and push and pull and do their thing. Okay, because we're looking now, we have a mission going to Europa. It's a ice penetrating radar mission that will orbit. So Europa has this ice sheet on top and we're quite certain that there's a highly confident, there's an ocean of liquid water.

46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's kept liquid from the tidal stresses of Jupiter itself. If it's just an ocean underneath ice, I guess it's kept warm because of the tidal stress and maybe that's the source of energy. That's the source of energy. That's the source of energy for it. Because without it, you would have no energy source. I mean, even if it is dormant, we will still be able to find it if it is there. Because we have fermenters on this planet that are also quite lazy. The voltage between the giver and receiver is pretty minimum. They're really weird. Fermenters? I mean, it is basically, if you're thinking about the ladder between the donor and the acceptor, fermenters, we want the ladder to be, if we draw a line between the donor and receiver, we want that line to be as steep as possible.

47:02but when it comes to fermenters you're getting almost a flat line it's the equal footing but it still works so so even though thermodynamically at all yeah hardly any i thought about that even though you know it is not by looking at it it's not energetically favorable like a maybe a carbon fixture might be or an photosynthesis might be doing it is still doing its thing so what i'm saying is that dormancy or this kind of slow process we'll not get in the way we will take what we got let me get to europe whatever the slope is it's a bunny slope but we're taking it But yes, metabolism, absolutely important.

47:34It's the energy. It's the engine. It's all about the battery, right, when it comes to life on this planet. So we have to think about that.

47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Those two, I'm happy as being the only criterion for life. But you speak to a pure biologist, not an astrobiologist. They start adding other things. Has to be susceptible to evolution. Has to be able to reproduce. And I'm thinking, really? You think so? And how do you feel about these other criteria? Absolutely. I mean, you cannot just have a battery. that's just sitting there, right? The battery needs to produce another battery somehow. Why? Well, then it's not life. It's just sort of a battery. Why can't it just be a battery that lives a billion years? But then it's not life, though. What do you mean?

48:13How is it going to live?

48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, it lives slowly. I was going to say, it lives until it runs out of juice. It likely can assemble, but in order for at least our understanding of life, that memory of the information that assembled that metabolism per se, it has to continue. So you're saying a bunch of logs laying in a pile is not a house. you got to actually have a house in order for it to be. Not a house I want to live in. Yeah, where's the bricks and mortar? But I guess what I observe in the field also, I think there was some division between metabolism or is it information, is it informatics, or do we need to replicate or do we need to eat, right?

48:52And I think we are more merging right now that we need both. It's a problem that needs both ends. Not only you need metabolism, but also you need a way to transform that information of the presence of the metabolism to your offspring.

49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right, so to cap this between you two, for everybody listening, including me, can you give me, in a very succinct statement, what is life? Life is a form of chemistry that maintained a memory over really long time periods. That's all I can say about life at this point. Okay, that was very romantic. I'm working mammary. Like the corners of my mind. It's not good, it's not bad. It retained it, right? I got you. Okay.

49:50Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Epglis, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

50:20Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

50:50Prime Day is June 23rd through the 26th. These deals are so appealing. like portable steamers for steaming. Whoa, did I just sing soprano? I think I'm breaking into song. Epic deals on air fryers, vacuums, and skincare. I can't stop singing. Shop Epic deals this Prime Day, June 23rd through the 26th. Ooh, I think that's it. Nope, there's more. Luggage, smart glasses. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird.

51:35Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.

52:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:We like thinking that intelligence is important because humans are intelligent, but then I say, who said humans are intelligent? It certainly ain't me. We define ourselves as intelligent. We define ourselves as intelligent. We coexist in this world with cockroaches and highly, highly viable life forms coexist with us. and don't have anything of what we would call intelligence. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival. Otherwise, I think it would have shown up more in the tree of life than it has. So, but I've heard this term chemical intelligence. What is that? And how does that fit to what I just said, if at all?

52:40Yeah, I think, I mean, intelligence is an interesting term, especially these days, because what does that even mean, right? So we attribute it to artificial intelligence. Like, what is that? What makes the artificial system intelligent? I guess we wanted to confront that with a new term, which is chemical intelligence. It's not artificial, it's not biological, but there's an underlying intelligence to life. At the heart of life and its emergence, we think that these reactions that we talked about, that complex systems, they're probably coupled to one another, right? You're not looking at a complex carbon fixation metabolism, right?

53:11These are very big. There's some, it's like a huge, it's a crowded place in the cell. Everyone is reacting with one another. But early on, we think that they release cycles coupled to one another. So they produce a waste, that's a chemical, and another cycle takes it, rotates it, there's input and output constantly. And that is really probably the most fundamental form of metabolism.

53:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:So it's a chemical factory, in a sense. I mean, life is, in a way, too. But you can also simplify it in the basic form that we like to refer to them as autocatalytic. So they've been able to catalyze their own presence. Autocatalytic. Yes. Yes. You said it better than my auto catalytic. I gotta do a lot of like. Okay, now we even, because I couldn't pronounce your name. Okay, but it's not fair. I should be saying. And I like the way you say it like you're from Brooklyn. Auto catalytic. Yeah, the hand was in that gesture. So I have a fast story that happened to me 30 years ago. Okay. We had just, we, the astronomical community, had discovered this possible signs of life on a meteorite that is from Mars, okay?

54:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:The famous Alan Hills meteorite. Back in 1996 it was, I think it was. I'm on a TV show with a biologist, okay? Discussing this result. And they had this scanning electron microscope photo of something that looked like a little worm thing. Very small, like one-tenth the size of the smallest cells on Earth, okay? Really small. and they need an electron microscope to see it. Okay. We're exploring what is this evidence on this rock. There's like organic molecules. There's a, and it's tantalizing evidence. The biologist upon seeing this little wormy thing said, that can't possibly be life. And then I thought, wow, he's really certain about this.

55:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:There's nothing I'm certain about in the universe that I would utter with that level of confidence. Okay. But he's certain about this. And I said, why? And then he said, because that's a fraction the size of the smallest life on Earth. And I said, last I checked, the rocket's from Mars. Okay. So why are you, a biologist, that's stuck with only one kind of life, passing that kind of judgment on what could be life on another planet? The first, well, it's amazing that you were in that room, first of all. That's pretty cool. Second, though, is that we know now that the size is not necessarily a determinant of life forms.

55:46Their base, like ribosome itself, the presence of a ribosome, I will argue, would be life, right? So it has to come together through biology. So size itself is not what I would go after if I were to first criticize that sort of finding. So no, size alone isn't. And that's the beauty, I think, about space exploration is that we learn so much about what are the limits of life and what life is. Is it something that I know when I see? Or, you know, is it something that I can attribute to size? Is it just some chemicals? Is it some sort of movement? Like, what is it exactly?

56:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because that affected the, let me just call it a bias. When we first landed on Mars, we performed tests with the Viking lander. We have our own bias. Life is what we're looking for. Yeah, and if something's there that you're not looking for, will you find it? Right, especially if you have a preconceived notion of what it should be. If you preconceive of what it should be. We're just happy that the universe has confirmed that size does not matter. Not only that study, of course, led to the realization that we need experts that can combine or look into some biological process on a rock and interpret it.

57:01We didn't have that kind of understanding. So we've got to be a little bit gentle, I think. But we know now far more suppresses than what we thought life can, how it can express itself.

57:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:An informed biologist, and certainly not you, would have reacted that way in that conversation. I wouldn't go after, you know, whether there could be smaller life forms than what they're saying. But nevertheless, there are obvious. Now we can do more. We can look at isotopes. We can understand to what degree. It is actually so crazy. I mean, think about the sugar molecule or caffeine. Some people have mugs with the caffeine molecule in it. Right? We can understand each atom and the discrimination of each atom, their discriminative properties of the atmospheric isotopes. But we can like atomically explore each atom.

57:47Yeah.

57:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's a beautiful thing. Through the clumped isotope methodology. And we can attribute whether that value is coming from a biological system or none. That is so insane to me. I mean, there are very few people in the world that can do this really well. It's very easy to mess this up. So I respect to them. But we can identify if it is just amino acid on an asteroid versus a microbe or advanced living microbe. So we can do these sophisticated studies. And we are getting there now with the sample return, right? With the Bennu. It's just so much happening. And in fact, it was today a paper came out.

58:24I was reading it on the way here. that took dinococcus, this really resistant, crazy buck that can survive under really harsh conditions and radiated and put this insane amount of pressure on it to understand whether this buck can survive planetary travel. And they found that it can, at least numerically, it can handle really, really high pressure. So that's kind of amazing. That's the Panspermia hypothesis.

58:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:Exactly. I mean, they're kind of linking it to that as well, Well, very carefully, because that one line of data doesn't make an entire concept, you know, doesn't prove the whole thing. Right, of course. But it is fun to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, to dream about all the ways of being alive. And so what about these science fiction writers' best friend is thinking about silicon-based life, swapping silicon in for carbon every place you find it? Because they have the same outer electron configurations, so you can make all the same molecules. Well, protein engineers showed this. About seven years ago, a paper came out that showed that in an enzyme, they could replace the carbon with silicon.

59:26So at least engineering-wise, we demonstrated that you can, to some degree, push an enzyme to use silicon instead of carbon.

59:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:And still have the same function it did before? Yes, albeit with some variations in the sense of it's not maybe as efficient, but it's fine. Sure, sure. But in a whole organism, look, nobody wants weird, strange life forms more than me. Okay. But I also want to be able to study something and not hallucinate. Right, right. There's a part that imagination is great, but then you've got to be, I think, a little careful. Then not go a little. Go too far. Alien hallucinations can be a little too much. Go too far. Exactly. So we've got to start with what we know and especially understand that we know very little.

1:00:05We know less than we think we do.

1:00:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's always true at all times. At all times. For everyone. Exactly. I'm sorry. You want to know about life. my rebuttal to the silicon-based life versus carbon-based life, just as an astrophysicist, is that there's at least five times as much carbon in the universe as silicon. Well, that kind of goes back to the beginning of our discussion. So you don't need to appeal to silicon. You don't need to do it. Because carbon's too available. It's too available. It's very fertile in the chemistry lab. And it's like you say, whatever the easiest way, life is lazy. But if you think about it, But life also relies on all these rare elements and metals on this planet that is like there's nothing for the universe.

1:00:49It looks like it's just a waste, right? Like something that you would not even consider as fat of the sake. You know what I mean? It's just like, sure, take it. And then look what life did.

1:00:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. That's being opportunistic, perhaps. That's inspirational. That, you know, again, it will assemble this insane, look at us. Look at, you know, look at the world. It will come out of like almost out of nothing for the planet, for the universe. Right. And that's what we study with the NASA Center, MUSE, the Metal Utilization Center. Yeah, tell me about that. We are trying to understand how the oceanic content across billions of years have inspired organisms to do their thing. We want to know how they competed against a certain metal. Life is metal, right? Life relies on metals. Enzymes do their thing.

1:01:32They are able to do all these crazy thermodynamic barrier breakings because they eat a lot of metal. They depend on this. And metal has to come from somewhere.

1:01:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:What do you say metal? You mean iron? if you're interested in molybdenum. Well, calcium, I mean, astrophysically, everything that's not hydrogen or helium, we call metals. Oh. It's stupid, but it's leftover from the old days. Forget it. After that, you're done. Look at this feast life created with all the leftovers. And with the leftovers. Exactly. Right, think about it. 98 % of the universe is hydrogen and helium. Right. Everything of interest to us is with the 2 % that's leftover. Exactly. And we know it's a very iron-rich planet right early on. Yeah. And then with oxygen, what happens? What happens with oxygen?

1:02:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:With iron, you get rust. Exactly. So you're fried. And we see that in the rock records. That's how also we understand that our planet has gone through such revolution. These are these layers of iron deposits. Iron deposits. Yeah. Exactly. It's life-generated. Exactly. Sorry, it's not an iron ore coming through. It's the iron left over. And by the way, that knowledge is also only like 30, 40 years old. We did not know that microbes are able to leave a mark behind. In fact, when we opened the Rose Center, that was new information. And we made a very big deal of that in our exhibits to date back the earliest possible life.

1:02:55It comes back to a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Oh, what?

1:03:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:Somebody's tooting their own horn, I see. Gotta give the credit to Stanley. I got that figure action, too. Stanley Tyler, as he was doing, you know, what a good geologist does, you know, FANFO. And he was just hiking around and he came across with these iron deposits, some rock formations that are different than the others near Gunflint Church, which is the Canadian border. and he wanted to understand this and he collaborates with a scientist at MIT and they are able to do all kinds of electro, you know, basically relying on the radiation technology, not only date the rock, but understand that there's a microbe here, which completely transforms our understanding because if you think about it, I'm going back to Darwin, even he contemplated with about origin of life in the past, just maybe once or twice, some warm little punt, whatever.

1:03:50But his biggest dilemma was that if everything comes from an ancestor, where is the ancestor of the ancestor? You're full of a cliff once you pass Cambrian. Like there's all these, you know, adiachron things and footsteps and, you know, like bones and whatever. Bones are late, but you know.

1:04:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's post-Cambrian explosion. Exactly. And before it, you got nothing. You got nothing. So a lot of people were also, at that time, there's all these intense letters to Darwin saying, how do you explain what happens? Because there's a gap, right? There's this huge gap. And through these studies that are only 30, 40 years old, we now know that that entire 4 billion period was microbial. And now we are able to go to a rock and atomically process it and understand that those colors are generated due to once living microbe. Insane. And it is red because there was oxygen on the planet and they liked iron, but boohoo, so bad.

1:04:38It's a catastrophe because now there's oxygen on the planet and you're gone. So what we are interested in understanding is that how that shift, the presence of oxygen, transformed organisms an entire life on this planet.

1:04:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm just glad I am on the side of the biology fence where I can metabolize oxygen rather than have it kill me. Have me be like melting like the Wicked Witch of the West. Oxygen, I'm melting. So something I missed, what is it that we do today to create the nitrogen necessary to infuse into our agriculture? Very good problem. There are two ways. One is coming from biology, and that's biological nitrogen fixation. And we also have the Haber-Basch process. And how does that work? It's a very energetically expansive process. It not only obviously uses nitrogen, but also hydrogen. And in the presence of a catalyst and really high pressure produces ammonia.

1:05:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:Nitrogen is just in the air. Yeah, nitrogen is always in the air, but it's not readily available. So we do... Free nitrogen is not available for you. In the form that is useful for biology. So it needs to be converted into ammonia. Okay, so now you've got ammonia, now what? You've got clean floors. Well, we need it for fertilizers. So that's where they go primarily. But say, for example, cereal or corns, they use biological nitrogen fixation primarily. Because when you farm, that's what comes out of the soil. Exactly. It's the nitrogen that comes out of the soil. So this allows you to re-energize or replace the nitrogen in the soil.

1:06:14I think what is really interesting here is that as we read more about our past, as I understood more what our planet has gone through, and when you connect biology and molecules to the planets, which is something we have to do if we are serious about finding life. Right. Because even though we are making our observations at these large scales, ultimately we are looking at an expression of something really, really, really tiny. And so that's the molecule. So we need to be able to connect molecules to a planet ultimately.

1:06:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. Otherwise, you know. Exactly. But that bridge was missing. So I think our research fills that gap. through the planetary biology concept. And what we are understanding is that just because something isn't around doesn't mean it was useless. And that our planet has gone through things that actually could teach us a lot about the future because they resemble our future. And resurrecting tools of the past. Exactly. To shape our future. Nice. Lovely. So is your lab funded by NSF? We definitely had support from NSF, NASA. Not for long. If it's up to me, I'm just saying. Quite frankly, I need the money to start more wars.

1:07:23John Templeton Foundation was very generous with us. They came in, yes. As well as the Keck Foundation. And also the Hypothesis Fund. That's new to me, Hypothesis Fund. Yeah, they sort of... It's a good name for a fan. Nimble Funding for Nimble Minds, I think. So I got a cold call one day saying, if we give you this much money, what would you do with it? And I'm glad you asked because I have all these ideas. And this is the whole idea of, they said, okay, great, but no respect to elders. What can this do for me? Give me like, what is your sort of moonshot experiment? And I said, well, I think there's a lot we can learn from the past for our future.

1:07:58And so they invested in this work. And then later, Keck Foundation supported it. And that's our primary funding right now.

1:08:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:And Keck, of course, funded our twin telescopes in Hawaii. Wow. The Keck Observatory. So I'm delighted to learn of this. I'm more delighted to learn that your work is visible enough to attract cold calls from funders. That's serious. That's serious stuff. Ain't nobody ever called me to offer me some money. Just letting you know, that's when you know you're doing something right. When they call you, I'm like, do you need some money? Like to give you some money. Like that's when you know you are kicking ass. I thought it was a joke because it was my birthday. So I thought, who's this? And that's not funny, but then it was real.

1:08:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's great. I had to write a proposal, of course, but it was an invitation. Just congratulations on this. It sounds like it's very fast moving. Be delighted to catch up with you again when you've got more enzymes and we'll find out just how different our future is going to be. Just make some enzymes and we'll talk about those. Oh, that would be great. We're working on it. We bet. We're on it. You want to find out in what way your professional work will influence the future of civilization. And if you want to give the number to the lab, maybe there's somebody out there that might want to give some money.

1:09:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:How do we find you on social? Are you active on social media? I am on Instagram. Yeah, I used to be on Twitter. Now it's X. I'm still there. I have the account. Okay. Yeah, they can for sure find me there. Instagram and what are you called on Instagram? My really hard to say first and last name, dot astro. Dot astro. bitul.astro bitul.astro I finally got it right excellent well thank you for joining us thanks for having me this was great on StarTalk it clarified some confusions I had and brings a whole field of study into the attention of our highly scientifically curious audience thank you for having me and I hope we realize that past is not something to be feared only to be understood as Mercury said.

1:10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:You don't know my past, Bitul. I'm just letting you know. Hey, you don't know mine either. Okay? This has been another installment of StarTalk. Thanking my guest, Bitul Kachar from University of Wisconsin-Madison for sharing her expertise, her wisdom, and insight on life yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Ooh, look at that. Here and there. got both dimensions going. Sounds like a soap opera. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Until next time, as always, keep looking up.

1:10:55Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with EPCLIS. a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

1:11:26Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

1:11:55Prime Day is June 23rd through the 26th. These deals are so appealing, like portable steamers for steaming. Whoa, did I just sing soprano? I think I'm breaking into song. Epic deals on air fryers, vacuums, and skincare. I can't stop singing. Shop Epic deals this Prime Day, June 23rd through the 26th. I think that's it. Nope, there's more. Luggage, smart glasses.