What is life, and how much say do we have in shaping what comes next?

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker joins artist and futurist Amy Karle to explore the questions they each reach from opposite directions: what life is, how it begins, and how we would recognize it somewhere else. Drawing on Walker's search for the physics and possible laws of life and Karle's art made with the tools of frontier science and biotechnology, they find where a scientist's attempt to see life differently meets an artist's attempt to help us feel possibilities we do not yet have language for.

Their conversation explores time and how differently each of us lives it, possibility versus probability, creativity as a force that shapes the world, the traces we leave for the future, bioprinting and what we become when we remake the body, how a work changes as different cultures receive it, and the question of what part we play in the universe's ongoing creativity.

Three core questions:

1. What does it mean to be alive, and how would we recognize life radically unlike our own?

2. Can genuinely new possibilities emerge, or is the future fundamentally constrained by the past and by probability?

3. Is the universe itself creative, and what role do life, intelligence, and human agency play in that creative process?

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GUESTS

Sara Imari Walker – Astrobiologist & Theoretical Physicist

Professor and Deputy Director, Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University

Author of Life as No One Knows It and co-developer of Assembly Theory

https://search.asu.edu/profile/1731899

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo…

Amy Karle – Artist, Bioartist & Futurist

Known for Regenerative Reliquary and The Heart of Evolution

Exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Centre Pompidou, and the Mori Art Museum

https://www.amykarle.com

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Chapters

00:00 Meet Sara Imari Walker and Amy Karle

01:14 What does it mean to be alive?

04:41 The futures cone, and how much we shape what comes

07:33 Possibility, probability, and the outliers that surprise us

10:40 Living out of the past, or starting from a blank slate

16:28 Echoes from the Valley of Existence: leaving DNA on the Moon

23:04 Our very different relationships to time

42:07 Powers of Ten, and seeing clearly in the AI age

47:48 What would alien life be, and how would we know it?

58:06 Amy's beginning, and the fragility of life

1:04:37 The Heart of Evolution, and who we become when we remake the body

1:08:40 Scary and beautiful: how cultures complete the work

1:18:15 Perception, and our role in the universe's creativity