Kauffman on the small stuff

Stuart Kauffman, from The Edge:


As I proceed here there are several points to keep in mind. One is that you cannot do a work cycle at equilibrium, meaning that the concept of an autonomous agent is inherently a non equilibrium concept.

A second is that once this concept is developed it's only going to be a matter of perhaps 10, 15, or 20 years until, somewhere in the marriage between biology and nanotechnology, we will make autonomous agents that will create chemical systems that reproduce themselves and do work cycles. This means that we have a technological revolution on our hands, because autonomous agents don't just sit and talk and pass information around. They can actually build things.

The third thing is that this may be an adequate definition of life. In the next 30 to 50 years we are either going to make a novel life form or we will find one—on Mars, Titan, or somewhere else. I hope that what we find is radically different than life on Earth because it will open up two major questions. First, what would it be like to have a general biology, a biology free from the constraints of terrestrial biology? And second, are there laws that govern biospheres anywhere in the universe? I'd like to think that there are such laws. Of course, we don't know that there are—we don't even know that there are such laws for the Earth's biosphere—but I have three or four candidate laws that I struggle with.