What is Life?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

In a region as complex as the Bay Area, the headlines don't always tell the full story.

That's where KQED's podcast, The Bay, comes in.

Hosted by me, Erica Cruz Guevara, The Bay brings you local stories with curiosity and care.

Understand what's shaping life in the Bay Area.

Listen to new episodes of The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certapro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Robin Inks, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

We began the series asking how the universe will end, and we're finishing this series by asking how life began.

Basically, what we're doing is we're running the whole thing backwards so there's a happy ending.

And the problem is that, of course, Brian, though, there won't be a happy ending because he'll then explain that we need to go further back and eventually we'll return to a time before light and matter when everything was crushed together at terrible heats.

It's not my fault, is it?

It's just the way the universe is.

Physics always spoils everything, doesn't it?

It does spoil things, physics.

Today, we are following in the footsteps of Erwin Schrödinger and asking the question which was the title of his influential book first published in 1944 what is life?

Joining us to discuss this profound question are four separate populations of interacting cells at least one of which has won the Nobel Prize and at least one of which we are very certain has not and they are Hello, my name is Ross Noble and before COVID I used to be a stand-up comedian and now I'm simply an amateur chicken farmer who has a lot of chickens who are sick of me doing shows for them and and I think the most intriguing form of life on earth is anything that can not only survive but chooses to live in Romford

what a relief by the way Ross we haven't had any letters of complaint this series so thank you very much

the people of Romford ensuring that many arrive with an SS

the people of Romford cannot write oh we're weighing up the mailbag we're weighing the metal bag I think I should get on don't you?

My name's Paul Nurse.

I'm a researcher into genetics and cell biology and today I think the most intriguing form on life is definitely not a chicken.

It's a brimstone yellow butterfly and you'll understand that maybe by the end of the programme.

Hi, my name is Aoife McLeised.

I'm professor in genetics in Trinity College Dublin, which incidentally is where Erwin Schrödinger delivered those what is life lectures that the book is based on and I think the most intriguing form of life is the coronavirus because it's a tiny little thing at the edge of life and it has caused a huge disruption to the whole world.

And I'm Joe Brand, I come from Romford.

I am actually a full-time international model and

I think the most intriguing form of life is a seahorse.

And the reason I think they're great, there's three reasons.

First of all, in the morning they do a little sexy dance for their partner.

And my husband's booked that in for tomorrow.

I'm sure he's looking forward to it.

Also, they don't have many predators, which is always very reassuring to know, isn't it?

And also, the male of the species bears the burden of pregnancy.

And that's obviously why there's that saying, don't put all your eggs in one seahorse.

And I certainly wouldn't.

And this is our panel.

And it was wonderful, by the way, to hear the first barking dog in the background.

Every single week, we have at least, this never happens at the radio theatre.

Radio theatre, one week it turned out it was the astronaut Chris Hadfield's dog as well.

That was just as he got to a very pertinent point about life on the planet Earth, his dog entirely disagreed with him.

So

let's start off with the experts.

Let's start off with Joe and Ross.

So,

Ross, the definition of life.

How would you define life?

As I suppose we've seen it on the planet Earth?

I subscribe to the Keating theory that life is a roller coaster.

and you just have to ride it.

And

it's an interesting scientific theory because the thing is that a lot of people don't think it's been fully thought through because

does the roller coaster, does that represent existence and then the because he hasn't factored in the queue.

So is the Q itself, is that the sperm and the carriage itself is the egg?

But then he hasn't then factored in arriving at the at the park, the car park and stuff.

And he used to, he his theory was shot down

by the foresight theory, and that was that life was the name of the game.

And I want to play the game with you.

That's what he said.

And the chaos of life, the chaos of life, he addressed the whole idea of the chaos of it by saying that life can be terribly tame if you don't play the game with the tool.

This is very confusing.

Well, I do feel that we should go straight because, Paul, you have got a Nobel Prize.

So, if anyone's going to be able to answer the problems of Bruce Forsyth's lyrics, it's probably going to be you.

Maybe, not so sure.

I think living things can be defined because they have the ability to evolve by natural selection.

That's Darwin's big idea of course.

And to do that, they have to be able to grow, they have to be able to reproduce, they have to have a hereditary system which exhibits variability.

And if you put all that together and it all works, you have life.

Now, Joe, do you agree with that or disagree?

I don't know because I'm from Romford.

And

I'm not going to mention it again, Ross.

You'll be pleased to know.

And so will everyone else, I'm sure.

But

I like to try and go down the road of the most simple definition possible.

So for me,

life is anything that's not dead.

What's interesting,

given Paul's definition, Aooifa, you said in the introduction that you felt the coronavirus was the most

interesting or certainly well-known form of life at the moment.

But given Paul's definition,

viruses can't reproduce on their own.

So

are viruses, is it widely accepted that viruses are life forms?

I think you said on the edge of life.

Those were your words.

Yeah, I think people discuss them in that context a bit, you know, that they are a little,

you might consider them a little ambiguous.

I don't consider it ambiguous.

I think they definitely are life, but they are an utterly scale-back, minimalized form of life.

They can't do most of the things.

They are parasites.

They can't do most of the things they need to replicate by themselves.

They must be inside

another living cell, which is why lockdown works in theory.

You know, the virus can't move around by itself.

It can only move around and survive inside people.

But I think that also is true of lots of other things.

We can't, we're not totally self-sufficient either.

We need inputs

and the virus needs many, many more inputs than us.

But so I would still consider it alive, but I think it is on the edge of that definition.

And my definition that I like to use, the simple definition I like to use, is Joe likes simple definitions, is just that life is anything that's capable of self-replicating.

So that's not as elegant as Paul's definition.

And the problem with the definition of...

That's also, Eve, it's not as simple as mine either, to be honest.

I prefer yours.

But the problem with the definition I just gave there is that it would include something like a computer virus, because a computer virus can self-replicate.

But we don't really think that's alive, obviously.

But that's why the definition is clumsy.

So it's simple, but it's clumsy.

That's why Paul's is a lot nicer.

But yeah, coronavirus,

it's the most paired back form of life, I think, that we can consider.

Can I say something about viruses too?

Because I've been wrestling with it for over 50 years.

I think that was a very nice explanation.

I've come to the conclusion that they're both alive and dead.

They're alive when they're inside the cell, and they're dead, a chemical substance outside.

And I found that sort of satisfying.

Like strawberries for the monkey cage aficionados.

It's also a lovely segue for the fact that your new book, Paul, is initially inspired, is it not, by Erwin Schroedinger's series of lectures, which were they at Trinity?

I'm trying to think.

They were at Trinity.

You didn't listen to Aoife's introduction, did you, where she actually said explicitly that the lectures were given at Trinity?

He was both listening and not listening.

He was texting.

I'm always

in a superposition.

Just because it's topical, Paul, could you just describe how viruses reproduce and just characterize what a virus is?

So a virus, it is fascinating because

it is a chemical substance made of nucleic acid, which is the hereditary material,

and it coated usually in proteins.

But it can't do anything unless it infects a cell,

as you've already heard.

When it gets inside the cell, the RNA, if it's an RNA virus or the DNA, if it's a DNA virus, is released.

And then it's copied.

And after it's copied, it produces the proteins that are needed to make more of the DNA and RNA and also to cover the virus in that protein coat.

When the cell gets filled up with all those viruses, then the cell births and infects other cells around it, which is why it is the minimalist life form, because it can only work in other life forms.

And it's why I say it could be alive and dead, because when it's outside the cell, it's just like a chemical substance.

But I think what Ify said was so important.

We are all dependent upon other living things, all of us, just to a lesser or greater degree.

Viruses, to the greatest degree,

actually,

these algae, which can photosynthesize, that is, use light for energy and also for making molecules, are probably the most independent form.

But we're all interact one with another.

So the viruses are just at one extreme end, and we're a bit in the middle, and other microbes are at the other end.

Aooife,

Paul talks about RNA, DNA.

I thought it might be useful to have some definitions of RNA, DNA, and their role.

Okay, so I think DNA is the one that most people are familiar with.

This is one of these bits of science that's gone into popular culture.

So deoxyribonucleic acid in its long form.

And it is this famous double strand, double helix that is this beautiful image that people know about as well.

So you've got these two strands that are twisting around each other.

And each strand

is, you can think about it, you can think about it a bit like a twisted rope ladder.

And the rungs of the ladder are two pieces that have come together.

And there's essentially four pieces.

in this thing A, C, T, and G is what we denote them as.

And in the DNA, you have the two pieces come together.

It's always an A and a T and a C and a G.

And they build this structure, this double helix, and that's the thing we're talking about there.

So RNA is, it's DNA is deoxyribo, and RNA is just ribonucleic acid.

And essentially, RNA is almost the same chemically, but it's a single strand instead of a double strand.

And

instead of being ACTG, it's ACUG.

So it's one of them is slightly different.

And they both can function as the hereditary material, the stuff that we pass on.

But but for us, it's DNA that we have that gets passed on from parent to child.

And then RNA will do some of the work inside the cell.

So RNA for us ends up being the message.

It shuttles the message from the center of the cell, the nucleus, where all the DNA is sitting there.

And then the RNA shuttles the message from the DNA out into the main part of the cell where then the proteins get formed and they go ahead and do their jobs.

Can I ask a very quick question?

Is it still the case, because I was at university in the 19th century, is it still the case that you cannot inherit an acquired characteristic?

Yes, that's true.

So if you think about your body, your reproductive cells are kept very separate from the rest of your body.

So

if you're female, your ovaries, if you're male, your testicles, and the equivalent in other life forms, and those are separate from

the rest of your body.

So if you have a mutation, for example, a mutation could occur in your skin due to UV exposure, or it could occur in your lungs due to smoking.

And that mutation won't be inherited because it'll just be in that one part of your body, which is separate

from your

reproductive organs.

Ross, I don't know how you feel about that.

Sorry, yeah, Gaul.

Don't worry, I'll get straight to the extraterrestrials eventually.

Don't you worry about that.

But when you first hear both Aooifa and Paul talking about just those four letters, A, C, T, and G, and you go, so there's these four base proteins, and the variety of life, I think counter, it feels quite counterinstinctual to think just four base proteins.

And then you look around, I mean, you know, where you live and you're living on farmland, and you see all these different forms of life, and all of those chickens, and all of those things, and you think there's just four base proteins lead to all of the living things that we see.

All of those things are possible.

Let me give you a metaphor that might help.

If you take the Morse code, it's just dots and dashes, right?

Oh, yeah.

However, you can write all the works of Shakespeare with that.

You can turn through linear codes.

They can be very simple.

So the Morse code is like four bases.

But the proteins that come from it are like the works of Shakespeare.

Hugely diverse.

And if you put on top of that the fact that the chemistry is very diverse, you have all the ingredients to make the huge diversity of life that you see around us.

I mean, you know.

No, no, no, but.

Well, the two things.

One, I'll be honest with you, at one point, I just like I'm in no way OCD, but I'm just worried about that tangled rope ladder because all I could think about was

Ewoks not being able to get to the shops.

Ewoks.

Oh, don't start.

Every time I resolve.

Oh, God.

It always happens.

Every time I see you, we talk about Ewoks.

Yeah, because I've realised that you can basically boil all science down to Ewoks.

You're absolutely.

But Ross, I know you're only joking, but it isn't a serious enough problem of the tangling of that rope ladder.

Yeah, no, no, no.

No, because

every time a gene is going to be read, so as Paul said, you know, it needs to be read and transcribed into the message, you have to unwind the rope ladder a bit in the middle, which pushes these knots up and down on either side of it.

And then this becomes a bit of a mess that needs to be potentially fixed as well.

So it does get tangled.

So it's just, it happens, that's all.

I'm just saying

why I was

making that very important scientific point.

That's why I made that point.

We should tell everyone that Ross is in Australia, and while we're recording this at three o'clock in the afternoon in the UK, it's currently midnight.

And though the listeners can't see this, Ross looks like someone who's a kind of local radio DJ who's rather annoyed that he's been bumped to the midnight slot.

I very much appreciate you making excuses for me.

I also have no

basic scientific knowledge at all, and you know, and I'm dyslexic.

So, when you're talking about those letters, it's a bit like when I watch Countdown and everyone's trying to work out the word, and I'm just singing along to the clock.

And that is why all the forms of life you've made in your laboratory have been such fascinating shapes as well.

I mean, I know I do always, I always take it back to science fiction, but from a from a movie point of view, I mean, you know, clearly, I mean, the correct answer is the film Splice.

But which film?

Adrian Brody.

I mean, you know,

he's unethical halfway through in that love scene.

But

which film?

Have you seen it, Robin?

No, I don't know who has.

Let's just find out from the audience.

Who's seen Splice?

No.

All right, well, perhaps.

Perhaps you all need to go away and do some important research about DNA and then come back and then we'll talk when you're experts.

That's all I'm saying.

Paul, as Aoife, as both of you have described this process, this central dogma, it seems extremely complex, elegant, as you said, but there's a lot of machinery involved in copying the genetic information and then turning it into some structure and the

life.

So

what do we know about what came first?

Because

it seems that it's all intertwined with each other, and it's all necessary for any living thing on Earth to function.

So, how can we do what do we know about how this came into being?

Well, we don't really know anything, to be honest, but we can speculate.

I think the most attractive hypotheses at the moment, they are only hypotheses, is that the first life forms were built on RNA.

Now, RNA, as Aether explained to you, is not a

duplex molecule, it's not a helix, it's single-stranded.

And what that means is it can fold up in a variety of different ways.

It's not a fixed structure like the double helix.

And so that means there is the possibility for weak chemical activities to be encoded in the RNA molecule itself.

It doesn't have to be translated into protein.

And if it has weak chemical activities, then there is the possibility that it could actually replicate itself using that chemical activity.

And therefore, you might have a solution to the problem that the RNA molecule can both be coding and also have chemical activity.

And once you've got that, maybe you can build something up which is more complicated.

Maybe the RNA could be found in little sort of lipid vesicles, say,

where it's protected from the outside environment.

And then eventually the RNA can perhaps drive the formation of the vesicles.

Maybe you can get translation into protein.

Perhaps it can all work.

But we don't really know how it works at all, how that could happen.

But RNA could be the starting material because it can code and at the same time have chemical activity.

Aoife, will we always, I was just going to ask, is that idea of the first life on Earth, will it always have to be a hypothesis or conjecture because

the actual physical evidence will not have remained?

Or is it a possibility that we might one day be able to pinpoint that first moment?

I think it will always have to be a certain amount of speculation because there are, I think, more there's more than one possible way it could have happened, and it it clearly did happen, but it's there's more than one possible way it could have happened, and so I think we can never 100%

know which exact path the origin of life took.

We can just talk about what's plausible and what's implausible.

And so, adding as well to what Paul was saying, there,

you know, the way that the first life would have existed wouldn't be exactly like life is now, of course.

It was what we have now is too complex to have arisen quickly, all in one go.

So, it would have gradually come about.

Things like RNA being both the message and

the messenger and

actually

doing the activity as well is the best hypothesis we have for how the information storage came about.

But there's also what would have been there instead of a cell and all of these kind of things.

And Nick Lane in UCL has really nice ideas about how there could have been little pockets maybe in

rocky surfaces that would have enclosed things sufficiently that the chemical interaction could have been enclosed.

And I think we can think of these earlier stages as a bit like scaffolding.

Like if you think like you're building some big fancy building and there are structures that are needed in order to get there and then they're no longer relevant once the thing is built.

And so we have these

early features that were these features that were important in the origin of life that are no longer relevant to life.

So like these little dimples in rocks, if that's what they were.

But they were the scaffolding that allowed life to build.

Joe, I find, to me, there is something quite remarkable about the idea that, you know, perhaps for, as Paul was saying, perhaps for a billion years, this is a lifeless planet.

You know, and then there is at some point, somehow, all of those things that possess no life whatsoever, almost, you know, hard to imagine that when we think of the Earth, there is this change, and

now we get to the complexity we get.

I just wonder how you feel about that stray, dead planet, tiny pieces of life, these tiny, and then eventually we end up with this vivid variety.

Yeah, well, I did some kind of evolutionary stuff at University, but I was at university a long time ago, and they were kind of teaching creationist stuff then.

So I know not really, but

I just I just think it's very hard to get your head round that really kind of early stage of

because I don't know if our brains, especially not mine, are kind of tuned to sort of understand.

I understand like the length of time and the infinite variety of chances there might have been, but at some point there was some sort of initial spark, wasn't there, that started it all.

And I just cannot kind of get my head round at how that would how that would have happened.

I just can't.

Well, you know, Joe, you're in good company.

Can I just say, I mean, really, we are only guessing.

The ideas that Ither explained are fantastically interesting.

Nick Lane here in London proposed them.

They're really imaginative, but they are just ideas because it's so difficult to know.

I mean, it's 3.5 billion years ago, for goodness sake.

I mean,

what was it like then?

And some people think, by the way, that

it couldn't have taken place so quickly in a few hundred millions of years.

And so it arrived, life arrived on a comet or an asteroid from somewhere else altogether where they had longer to produce.

I don't think that's likely myself, but some people think that.

Do you think we'll ever sort of get to the stage in like thousands of years' time when people will kind of look back and kind of roar with laughter at what we all thought, you know, like the we do

at the Flat Earth Society, for example.

Well, we do it all the time, don't we?

We were just

you know, mocking acquired characters from Lamarck.

You were talking about it.

You know, what we think now will be probably mocked, at least some of it, um

in ten years are the are the the the comet theorists are they are they an actual uh recognized sort of um a group of scientists or are they or are they basically just like nut jobs like

like no they're not nut jobs

francis because francis crick of crick and watson was one of the people who proposed it but it was a proposal of desperation not lunacy but desperation which the wonderful if you've never heard it before, it's called panspermia, this wonderful kind of vision of, but I suppose if the problem is that it still wouldn't answer anything, would it?

If life comes from somewhere else, you go, well, it still doesn't say how it began.

It just says this is the seed that arrived on the street.

It's displacing the problem to somewhere else.

Yeah, and yeah, you're just shifting the problem somewhere elsewhere.

And that was, that's, I suppose, like Paul said, it was an argument born of desperation just because it's so difficult to explain.

But I think, I don't feel feel like it's a necessary explanation.

I think a lot of we see a lot of weird, improbable things happen even in

evolution after life evolved.

And Joe was mentioning the idea of a spark, you know, maybe like I don't know if that's the way you were thinking, but if you were thinking of a single spark maybe that started off life.

But

we don't.

I know that's rather concrete of me.

But no, but we don't necessarily think, have to think necessarily even that life originated just once.

It maybe just

persisted once long enough for us to be still here.

So that it could have been lots of types of life or some early things that could have potentially become life, but they didn't all survive.

And maybe

one of them out-competed the other, and the others, and that's the beginning of the lineage that led to us and all the other beautiful diversity of life we have.

Paul,

this idea, we've talked about the origin of life.

In some sense, although, as you say, it's way back three and a half billion years ago, we don't understand it.

But I can kind of imagine that it's just chemistry, although very complex carbon chemistry.

But then we go on to the emergence, you know, a long time later, what, three billion years later or so, of huge collections of single cells that could interact together to not only just reproduce, but ultimately to think, which is us.

What do we know about that process?

Because to me, that is even more remarkable.

That you could.

I mean, I think in your book, you talk about cells just that you use with appropriately caveated the word purpose.

The purpose is just to copy base.

That's what they do, they copy.

But get them together in a big enough bag, as it were, which is us.

And they build spaceships and go to the moon.

Well, I put in the book, I put a white flag up, really.

I said,

we'll solve this in the next, the century after this one.

How on earth does this chemistry and physics give rise to creative thought?

I mean, I struggle with it, I must admit, completely struggle.

But isn't it interesting?

I mean, these, I mean, all these, what it is, is, of course, our brains are made up of these specialized cells and they make lots and lots of connections to other cells.

They connect with each other with the spark of life, with electricity.

So there is a spark there, a vitalist spark.

And somehow, thought emerges.

And can I say, regardless of what you read about neurobiology, we don't have a clue.

I love it.

I love the fact that, like, I love the fact you've want to know about Bridge and you've gone into all this, like, it's just like, and then the fact that before you just said, we're just guessing.

I love that.

I love that so much.

Wouldn't that be just brilliant?

It's so important.

Just if once, like, the Pope walked out on the balcony and went, ah,

tomorrow.

Yeah,

maybe, maybe,

you know?

Love it.

It's a fascinating idea that something as complicated as

us,

you know, as Ross and Joe and all of us here,

the information to build us is contained ultimately in a single cell

at some level.

It's amazing.

It's utterly amazing.

And I mean, you know, you go to physics and you worry about dark matter and dark energy.

I mean, and

it's really

interesting.

Or even is there something beyond the, you know, the Higgs?

And is there a new physics and so on I think of three things that are fundamental for me in biology one I think we can tackle and the other two I'm not so sure the first is how can a cell be organized with purpose and that's this information and chemistry and physics and I think in the in the next decades maybe a hundred years we will solve that I do think we'll solve that the second one is brains and thinking.

We've already said that.

And that

I'm struggling with.

Because how do you get consciousness creative thought how do you connect um physical matter physics and chemistry with self and with conscious thought and and that that i i wrestle with and the third one we've already talked about the origin of life i think we're always going to be speculating there the first of these is difficult but soluble the other two i'm not so sure of and there's something that i find really fancy fascinating as well about thoughts and ideas and because we we think of them as kind of

as things that don't exist in a physical form.

So, you don't think of your thoughts at all as having any physical manifestation.

Yet, if you get a brain injury, you can lose memories,

you can damage your thoughts and your memories in such a way.

And so, that's a physical injury to your brain that will somehow break your memories or break your ability to do certain things.

So, and that tells you that there must be some physical form to those things as well, that even though they feel so

beyond the physical.

But

this is the level that I start thinking about it, just going, wow, it's just, I don't have answers, but I find it fascinating and it contradicts our instincts, I think, and it contradicts our intuition.

And that's part of what makes it really, really fascinating, but also really difficult.

Well, if anyone would like to know less about this issue, then they can listen to the episode we did last week about the brain, where over a period of about an hour and a half of recording, we managed to fail to answer question one and left the other 22 questions well alone.

Sorry, Ross, you were.

So I was just going to ask then, I know this is so, so, what are we going to get to first?

And so, like, because obviously, ultimately, you know, all of these things lead to the rise of the machines killing us all.

So,

like all science, basically, that's what it's there for.

Let's just agree on that now.

There's no question of that.

So, which is going to happen first then?

Like,

machines replicating human thought and then using that in order to rise up, or

are we going to get to that first, or are we going to get to like actually being able to

build the brain that then becomes thought that then that rises up?

Which, what are we looking at here?

Aoife, which dystopia do you want to go for?

I think it's probably easier to train machines to do something that looks like human thought.

It isn't quite, but it simulates it it quite well than it is to make anything like a brain.

We can't even make a cell from a single cell from first principles.

If you heard a few years ago, there was this big news splash where they said they had, you know, created life, this thing they called Cynthia, but they had actually just synthesized a really long strand of DNA and inserted it into a cell that they had removed the other DNA from.

So this thing of actually building a cell is really, really difficult.

And this is what Paul's referring to as well.

I think, in, you know, how do you you create this thing with purpose and that's organized?

So I think that's probably a more difficult problem than teaching a machine to do something that looks like thought, but for the machine to really think independently,

we have to define at what point we agree it is independent.

I think that like over these hundreds of thousands of years,

intellectual thought is kind of

really cranking up and speeding up, isn't it?

And I think things will happen much more quickly.

I was a big fan of HAL in 2001.

and so I think that's going to happen at some point.

But if you look at the development of creatures, I just sort of over hundreds of thousands of years, I saw a brilliant thing.

I'm sorry, everyone, it was on Mum's Net, but

someone wrote in

about their daughter, and they were worried about her because she was in a swimming group

and she was being bullied because she was stuck in one swimming group and not good enough to go up to the next group.

And

I think the names of

these swimming groups were just a perfect representation of development, evolutionary development.

I've never heard anything like it.

So the top group was called dolphins, and then it went guppies, tadpoles, plankton, and bacteria.

Who came up with that?

That is so darning.

Also, if you were in bacteria, you'd go, I'll show you bacteria.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, once the dolphins get into this pool, they're going to find there's very little pure water left.

Were the bacteria kids?

Were they just the ones that hadn't?

They're not even good enough to get out of the foot bath in the changing rooms.

They're just standing there like cucks.

I felt sorry for Plankton as well.

It's not exactly moving on, is it?

In many ways, Joe, what you might like to do is

start your own group, just get a pen, and just above dolphins, write Japanese whaling fleet.

Now,

we always ask an audience question, but this was inspired this week by

the last few lines of Paul's book, which I wanted to read to you.

I think that they're a tremendous reflection on life, life on Earth.

And this is what Paul writes.

He says, As far as we know, we humans are the only life forms who can see this deep connectivity and reflect on what it might all mean.

That gives us a special responsibility for life on this planet, made up as it is by our relatives, some close, some more distant.

We need to care about it, we need to care for it, and to do that, we need to understand it.

I think is a beautiful summary of what we've talked about.

So that led us to the audience question, which is what is your best reason for not destroying all life on planet Earth?

Caitlin says, I'm still waiting for that hoodie I bought from Wish two years ago to turn up.

I'd hate to miss that.

Elaine said to allow Robin Ince's cardigans to continue evolving, they are very nearly sentient and just need a bit longer.

And of course, David Attenborough.

Andrew would like to say,

because I've just got my Wi-Fi working properly.

Yeah, this is right, this is a good one from Mike Craig.

He says, because we never find out how 2020 ends.

Yeah, nature we want to.

What about you?

We thought we'd ask you the same question.

So maybe start with Joe.

What is the best reason for not destroying all life on planet Earth?

Well, I've got three reasons, and they are decent people who give a toss, laughing, and curly whirlies.

Ross?

Well, I mean, put it this way, right?

Forget that question just for a second.

I just want to say this.

I'm going to get this is more important, right?

Because that's...

Are you a politician?

You're a politician.

Answer the question.

Answer the question.

Moving forward.

Moving forward, I think it's very important.

No, basically, this tonight has changed, it's genuinely changed my life, right?

Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a copy of Paul's book, right?

And the next, honestly, this is this changed my life.

I'm going to get a copy of Paul's book, right?

I will read it.

Sorry.

I'll have a go at reading it.

And

the next time my wife turns to me and goes, why haven't you put the bins out?

I'm going to go, read this.

paul best reason for not destroying all life on the planet earth well you i i said it in those last sentences they're all our relatives and we're all mutually dependent i think that's pretty two good reasons and if

well i think um you know if we did have that devastating thing that all life was destroyed, we would never get the same again.

There could be new life again, but every form of life we have and every individual is a total one-off, never to be repeated.

So you lose a lot.

But this must never, even though this seems democratic, what we've done, this must never be put to a democratic vote.

Oh, they've actually voted for destroying all life on the planet Earth.

I really wasn't expecting that at all.

Thank you so much to our wonderful panel, Paul Nurse, Eve McLeiser, Joe Brand, and Ross Noble.

And this is the end of this series.

It started as a six-episode series, but then extended to nine due to the speed of the expansion of the universe, I'm told.

I'll just stop you there.

That's not true.

Because the density of the universe falls as space expands.

So, following your logic, we should have done fewer episodes if we'd wanted to remain physically consistent.

One, very rarely do I wish to remain physically consistent.

In our partnership, you are the physically consistent one.

Twelve years hasn't changed a bit.

Me, I've gone with the entropy and the aging process.

Also, don't physical consistency could

affect the number of episodes episodes we get for the next series.

So

anyway, we will be back this winter for series 23 of our increasingly physically inconsistent voyage through this increasingly absurd universe in our infinite cage.

And that will, of course, be when the days have also got physically darker and possibly metaphorically darker as well.

There you go.

Down the ending, but that's entropy.

Goodbye.

That's what happens if you stick us so close to thought for the day.

Hi, I'm Joe Wicks, and I'm just popping up to tell you about my brand new podcast with BBC Radio 4.

It's extraordinary, it almost turbocharges you.

I'm really interested in the links between physical and mental health and what kind of ordinary, everyday activities people do to keep on top of things.

I keep fit because it's relaxing, because it absolutely relaxes my mind, and that's so important.

So, in this podcast, I'm having a chat with some of my favorite people to find out their tips and tricks to staying healthy and happy.

For me, it's a full-body experience, and it's a total game changer.

I think you're gonna love it.

Hit subscribe on the Joe Wix podcast on BBC Sounds.

Let's do this.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be hosted!

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.