#279 – Alien Debate: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin

The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin. They have each been on this podcast once before, individually, and now for their second time, they're here together. Sarah is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. Lee is a chemist, and, if I may say so, the real life manifestation of Rick from Rick and Morty. They both are interested in how life a originates and develops both life here on earth and alien life, including intelligent alien civilizations out there in the cosmos. They are colleagues and friends who love to explore, disagree, and debate nuanced points about alien life, and so we're calling this an alien debate. Very few questions to me are as fascinating as what do aliens look like? How do we recognize them, how do we talk to them, and how do we make sense of life here on earth in the context of all possible life forms that are out there? Treating these questions with the seriousness and rigor they deserve is what I hope to do with this conversation and future ones like it. Our world is shrouded in mystery. We must first be humble to acknowledge this, and then be bold in diving in and trying to figure things out anyway. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got uncruise for adventure, Linode for cloud computing, expressVPN for privacy, Roca for style and athletic greens for performance. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I tried to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a new sponsor called Uncruise Adventures. Small ship cruises sailing to Alaska, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Hawaii. Choose from hiking, kayaking, whale watching, seeing the northern lights, and much, much more. I have quite a bit of travel coming up, and there's something about taking a journey out into the unknown, getting to see nature in ways that you haven't quite seen through the mundane day to day of your daily existence, makes you both celebrate the new adventure and yet sort of rekindle your love for the place you call home. Anyway, you can save $500 on alaskanadventures through June for bookings made within 30 days of departure by going to uncruise.com pages lex. That's uncruise spelled uncruise.com pages lex. This episode is also brought to you by Linode Linux Virtual machines. It's an awesome compute infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale what applications you build faster and easier. This is both for small personal projects and huge systems. Lower cost than AWS, but more important to me is the simplicity quality of the customer service with real humans. 24 7365 I can't tell you, first of all how much I love Linux and how much I love cloud services that provide that infrastructure and make it super easy to manage it, to monitor it, to scale things up, to make many copies of it. I mean, just to run your computer infrastructure. It's the sexiest thing of all to me. Whenever you're doing business or even small scale projects, this is how you make it actually come to life. As they say, if it runs on Linux, it runs on linode. Visit linode.com lex and click on the create free account button to get started with $100 in free credit. That's linode.com lex. This episode is also brought to you by exprsVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the interwebs. I've used them for many, many years. I love exprsvpn. The big red sexy button just makes my heart sing. There's a lot of reasons you want to use a VPN, expressVPn being the best one. First of all, isps are still collecting your data. Internet service providers, it doesn't matter if you're using Chrome incognito mode, they can still see all the shady stuff you do on the Internet. Second, you can change location if you watch different shows on Netflix and Hulu and so on. Change your graphic location in a split second and it unlocks those parts of those platforms. To me, the most important thing is that expressvpn just works. It's fast. Whatever device you got, whatever operating system, including my favorite, of course, Linux. It works and it works wonderfully. It does a simple job and it does it well. Go to expressvpn.com slash Lexpod to get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com slash Lexpod. This show is also brought to you by Roka, the makers of glasses and sunglasses that I love wearing for their design, feel and innovation on material, optics and grip. Roca was started by two all american swimmers from Stanford and was born out of an obsession with performance. I met one of those founders, Rob, and he's an awesome human being. They have a place here in Austin, but more than the place, the people, both brilliant and passionate, and they know what they want to do, which is design a stylish eyewear. I actually did a long run today and I wore the shades. Part of the reason I actually wore the shades, it wasn't even that sunny, is I want to kind of escape from the world. I want to hide myself from the world. Sometimes I just want to hide away. It's the introvert in me. I was listening to a good audiobook, and I wanted to hide away and look good while doing it, which is why I wore Roca sunglasses. Check them out for both prescription glasses and sunglasses@roca.com. And enter code Lex to save 20% off on your first order. That's roca.com, and enter code Lex. This show is also brought to you by athletic greens and its newly renamed ag one drink, which is an all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. They replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. It's the first thing I drink every day. I drink it twice a day now. It brings my heart joy. The joy part might be a placebo effect, I don't know. But the fact of the matter is I do some crazy stuff in terms of physical and mental undertakings. I also fast often. I do keto diets. I do carnivore. I do all kinds of crazy stuff. And I can count on athletic greens to provide the nutritional basis that frees me to do the crazy stuff I do. That's freedom. It's having that nutritional foundation. They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up to athleticreens.com slash lex. That's athleticgreens.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin. First of all, welcome back, Sarah. Welcome back, Lee. You guys, I'm a huge fan of yours. You're incredible people. I should say thank you to Sarah for wearing really awesome boots. We'll probably overlay a picture later on, but why the hell didn't you dress up, Lee?