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The Conversation #8 — Chris McKay

Everything we know about bio­log­i­cal sci­ences, med­i­cine, agri­cul­ture, dis­ease, what­ev­er, is based on study­ing one exam­ple of life. Life on Earth. Life as we know it. If we find anoth­er exam­ple that’s dif­fer­ent, a sec­ond gen­e­sis, and inde­pen­dent ori­gin of life, com­par­ing those two might enable us to answer ques­tions that we would nev­er be able to answer if we only had one exam­ple to study. That could pro­vide prac­ti­cal ben­e­fits for humans as well as bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to man­age ecosys­tems, etc.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science

Hacking sci­ence and space explo­ration isn’t just about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing things. But it’s about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing dis­rup­tive­ly acces­si­ble things. Things that real­ly dis­rupt the cur­rent state of sci­ence and a lot of the elit­ism around it, and tru­ly make it acces­si­ble for everyone.

The Art of Discovery, As Seen by a Physicist

The sci­en­tif­ic method was per­fect­ed in the cru­cible of nat­ur­al sci­ence, and physics in par­tic­u­lar. And an old pro­fes­sor of mine once told me that a good the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist is intrin­si­cal­ly a lazy per­son. And so these heuris­tics of ignor­ing super­flu­ous detail, sim­pli­fy­ing the prob­lem to its barest essen­tials, maybe even mak­ing a car­i­ca­ture out of it, solv­ing that sim­pler prob­lem. If you can’t solve that sim­pler prob­lem, solve an even sim­pler prob­lem. This actu­al­ly works in physics. Because the uni­verse is intrin­si­cal­ly a lazy place.

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