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You're listening to Ted Talks daily, I'm Elise Hugh.

Stuart Kaufman founded an idea called the adjacent possible.

It's a mathematical theory that helps us understand, well, what's possible?

In his talk from Ted 2023, he explains the science behind deducing what happens next.

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Twenty-five hundred years ago, Heraclitus said the world bubbles forth.

Here's bubbling.

What is actual now enables what is next possible via adjacent possible.

The biosphere has been bubbling forth for four billion years, creating new possibilities in the universe in that bubbling.

It's critical that physics cannot talk at all about bubbling new bubbles.

Life on Earth started four billion years ago.

It is for the first two and a half billion years with single-sale organisms co-evolving.

Even my existing organisms create new possibilities.

If I'm a bacterium and you're a bacterium and I have a flat surface, I'm a possible highway you can walk over to get food.

That's bubbling forth.

So two and a half billion years after life started, six times, multisale organisms emerged.

A billion years after that, three and a half billions after life started, is the extraordinary Cambrian explosion.

Five hundred and forty million years ago, for fifty million years, there was just this burst of creativity making all of the phylo that exists now.

In order to talk about how the biosphere has been creative, I have to talk about the functions of parts of an organ.

You all know your heart keeps you alive, but in particular your heart pumps blood, it's not by making heart sounds.

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