It is an odd feature of the human mind that we use all these things that don’t exist to reason about the ones that do.

Recursive Worlds (@saraimari.bsky.social): Life reshapes how we think about reality: best understood in time, not space. Earth is a self-constructing system: ‘a very deep stack of recursive objects’ built over 4 billion years. recursiveworlds.antikythera.org

Unfold the history of proteins and you find rich, unexplained complexity. This August, an SFI working group with @ELSI_origins and @ASU_SCAS used machine learning and assembly theory to explore hidden rules underlying all folded matter, from proteins to potential new drugs. santafe.edu/news

We should always take seriously where computational descriptions fail, as it tells us something about where the current boundaries of what we can describe in language lie

Of all the materials that compose you, the most significant is time. It takes billions of years for our universe to generate structures like us.

Collaborate with researchers globally. Chart your transdisciplinary path. Apply to SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. Competitive pay, research funds, and generous benefits to become a leader in transdisciplinary research. Deadline: Oct 1, 2025 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Known examples of life persist across scales from the molecular to the planetary. Death also is a matter of scale, raising the question of which of our deaths matters most? The individual? The lineage? The biosphere/planetary? Or the universe?

Myths are very much alive in modern societies, and apart from in few cultural practices, like science, we have just as hard of a time recognizing when we are steeped in them as our ancestors did.

Toward Planetary Maturity: The RAND Corporation's new proposal for astrographic standardization will help to provide a standard grammar for #PlanetarySapience, thus helping to "mature the technosphere," as per @saraimari.bsky.social. My latest substack: nilsgilman.substack.com/p/toward-pla...

Finally, in the second Seeds of Story post, @saraimari.bsky.social's Life as No One Knows It offers cool new physics and a metric for whether that thing out there is aliens: reactormag.com/the-wild-ali...

Life as No One Knows It, my conversation with Sophia Al Maria during the inaugural AIR festival (also named Life As No One Knows It!!) now on Aspen Public radio, an incredible week celebrating art, artists, creativity and ideas with so many amazing humans ❤️ www.aspenpublicradio.org/ideas-speake...

“Human” is the most amazing configuration of matter any of us has ever observed, yet we deeply under appreciate what we are

What is the human aesthetic choice behind Google's algorithm ‘People also ask' - it seems like it prioritizes content scaling over relevance and/or depth. The answers are depressing and boring. Would love it to add value to my original search.Why is understanding NOT the aesthetic we are going for?

Physics for a new century should solve what we, and all life, share fundamentally youtube.com/watch?v=43Re...

@r-emrys.bsky.social explores the work of physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker, and how her insights into Assembly Theory and the origins of life might influence the future of science and science fiction 🌱 reactormag.com/the-wild-ali...

Many cannot see past the current representational maps that architect our minds & want them to remain static, but it’s important to recognize these can always be revised - the models we inhabit in our own minds should always be changing if we are to really come to understand anything about our world

The most transformative theories never come from trying to build better mathematical representations of current theories. Instead we get them by making direct contact with observations not accounted for in our existing map of the world.

What is Life? In her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker (@saraimari.bsky.social) explores the fundamental nature of life and how can physics help shape our understanding of how it arises in the universe. Full talk here: youtu.be/zhzxQraB2m0?...

"We are lineages, not individuals." @saraimari.bsky.social is such a badass! Making great & under-appreciated points in this @noemamag.com piece: www.noemamag.com/ai-is-life/

the term “prebiotic” in origin of life research is ironic given that it almost always refers to chemistry post-selected to be of interest to biology on Earth

The origin of life is not computable, yet it happens anyways

Math is evolved

Math is physical

Science is not about an automaton-like process of observation, measurement, experiment. It is about building explanations improving on those of our ancestors, ones we might want to gift our descendants if they choose to accept them.

Automating an experiment is possible, automating science is not - there is no scientific “super-intelligence” to train on the methods of science given no one can agree exactly what science is. It’s modern myth making to assume otherwise.

Science is not about an automaton-like process of observation, measurement, experiment. It is about building explanations improving on those of our ancestors, ones we might want to gift our descendants if they choose to accept them.

We published a new xenobot-related paper today: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... In a nutshell: building xenobots from frog "explants" is good because explants, apparently, come with adaptive potential "built in". This paper took 6 years and 10 co-authors (see post #2) to reach the light.

A major misconception about the physics underlying life is intelligence is about prediction. Intelligence assembles patterns in the past, it is impossible to predict the future. The best we can do is identify persistent patterns in our past that we anticipate will be in the future.

Of all the things our universe could have constructed but that never will exist, our planet rearranged matter over billions of years to assemble you. Existence is special even as its forms are transitory.

The physics underlying life is a physical invariant and observer-independent, computation is very much observer-dependent. We live in a causally rich enough environment our computational models sometimes work, but our computational languages obscure the truly alien

LLMs are recursively deep software, but shallow causal structures; human minds are recursively deep causal structures, our “software interface” is shallow. We can trick ourselves, anthropomorphizing a reality that is not there, thinking the world is experienced by everything as we see it in our mind

the ability to abstract comes from being a deeper causal structure in assembly space than almost everything around you

It’s a but sad the tech sector has made it no longer socially acceptable to talk about ‘agency’ as something life does in intellectual circles b/c they’ve appropriated the meaning of the word to only a small projection of it’s original conceptual space, the interesting stuff is no longer in the word

Scientists, no matter our generation, can be silly and very human. Thanks to @christophermichel.com for revealing the more playful side of who we are and what we do www.christophermichel.com/New-Heroes/N...

Reality is not computation any more than it was the calculus of a mechanical clock centuries ago. Let’s not confuse our technology with what our universe is, it’s a surefire way to close the future by stifling our ability to see beyond the dogmas of our time. longnow.org/ideas/physic...

I’m so impressed with @christophermichel.com’s ability to portray scientists as ‘new heroes’ of our time. It was such a joy to work with him and I’m honored to be part of his art. For more portraits of other humans on this epic journey we call science visit: www.christophermichel.com/New-Heroes/N...

Reality is not computation any more than it was the calculus of a mechanical clock centuries ago. Let’s not confuse our technology with what our universe is, it’s a surefire way to close the future by stifling our ability to see beyond the dogmas of our time. longnow.org/ideas/physic...

Photographed @saraimari.bsky.social at The Interval of the @longnow.org. We talked origins of life, assembly theory, and the universe as a creative act. Full story + portrait: glass.photo/cm/2f9pkwI47... @nationalacademies.org @arizonastateuni.bsky.social

What is life — and how can physics help shape our understanding of how it arises in the universe? Starting now: @saraimari.bsky.social Walker's Long Now Talk on an Informational Theory of Life www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0YH...

“Successfully detecting extraterrestrial life might mean we need to reframe how we currently conceptualize evidence for what even counts as ‘life’ on Earth.” — @future-humans.bsky.social to @saraimari.bsky.social #aliens #alienlife #astrobiology #futurehumans

Tomorrow: Join us for a Long Now Talk from astrobiologist and theoretical physicist @saraimari.bsky.social on An Informational Theory of Life 7 PM @ The Cowell Theater in San Francisco & Livestreamed on Long Now's YouTube Channel longnow.org/ideas/inform...

"Life, not computation, unlocks our non-deterministic future. Only by looking beyond our current technological moment to the next technologies creating new life forms will we be able to understand what our future could hold." Read @saraimari.bsky.social: longnow.org/ideas/physic...

The existence of life suggests a universe where the past is deterministic (and computable only because it already exists) but the future is undetermined

Many confuse computation with physical reality, treading on difficult territory at the boundary of our descriptions of the world and what is real, something that is becoming all too confused in the modern age

Our universities are among our most important social institutions because they bring critical issues, like what we are allowed to say, into incisive focus. Universities are more important for defining the future of what societies want and should be more than ever.

the origin of life isn’t going to solve itself is it? OR maybe it will. It’s always fun working on a problem that is literally about how the universe started to construct objects like yourself, meaning you have to look directly at the deepest roots of your own history.

“Now” is totally new. Our historical analogies often fail us because we confuse how the past was necessary to construct the present with the idea that the past is repeating itself, and right now we happen to live in a time when our narratives are particularly far behind.

It took a while, but I finally finished @saraimari.bsky.social’s “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence” — a radically mind-opening dive into what, exactly, *is* life. Highly recommend. #booksky

Merry Christmas 💫 Here’s my conversation for Quirks & Quarks holiday book show with Bob McDonald all about my favorite things: physics and the possibilities for life, of course!Hope you enjoy it ❤️ www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks...

We live at an odd moment in history when we have enough knowledge and technology to understand something of the possibilities for alien life, but not enough to determine if it exists, and if so in what ways