LinkedIn Presents.

I'm Rufus Griscombe, and this is the next big idea.

Today, part two of my conversation with astrobiologist Sarah Walker about the physics of life's emergence.

If you've listened to the first part of my conversation with Sarah and you're back for more,

I'm impressed.

Those are some wonderfully dense rants on the nature of existence.

And guess what?

Part two takes it up a notch.

But first, a little recap.

You will recall that Sarah Walker is 3.8 billion years old.

So are you. Because we are more than the carbon-based matter out of which we're made, which is, after all, not that special. It's the same stuff that plants,

rocks, and stars are made of. What is alive in us is the set of instructions through which

our bodies constantly rebuild themselves,

which is only possible because of the multi-billion-year lineage through which each of us was selected for.

In the episode you're about to hear, Sarah and I talk about the technosphere,

synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence.

We also explore the ways in which imagination is a physical act,

just as everything in our material universe is physical,

resulting in downstream consequences.

So we must imagine and we must embrace an optimistic theory of physics,

Sarah tells us, that a vision of our collective future,

because optimism exerts a force on the physical world, a force in the direction of the world

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