How do scientists measure—and define—life?

The description for life is very confused

It doesn't need a gene, doesn't need this, doesn't need that. And if you ask 10 different biologists what life is, you get a thousand different answers

My definition of life is any system that is able to produce complexity at scale

That's it. It's really simple. So basically you want to have this object, this machine, if you like

and it can spit out complex objects, identical numbers of them, and that thing that can do that is living

The way to determine if a system is alive or not is to calculate its assembly

Assembly, Big A, is really how much selection has gone on into this stuff

And the way to do it is to basically look at the stuff, count the number of objects that are identical

and then for each object, class, cut them up and get the assembly index

And so the assembly index times the number of objects gives you a number

and you sum them together, and you get this amount of assembly. So really, this then compresses the definition of life

is life does non-random things at scale. If you can measure if something is alive or not

then you can then start to understand the process are giving rise to life

You can find artifacts associated with life and that tells you how evolution

is occurring in the universe as a universal phenomenon. So how much selection is going on

And I think that's really important if we are to kind of understand the phase transitions that occur

between kind of sand, inorganic material and biological material that we going to find on Earth and in the solar system and in the universe How close am I to creating life

One of the most exciting things about assembly theory is not only does it allow us to understand

potentially the transition from non-life to life, number one. Number two, it allows us to quantify life

but even more importantly in the way, it allows us to think about how we can make life in the lap

And because we now understand the three parameters, and those three parameters are all about time

the time to make the objects, the time which the objects falls apart naturally

if there's no living system, time for which the object can persist in a living lineage

Those three times have allowed me and my colleagues to come up with a design to make a design

to make an origin of life machine. Similar to the kind of predictions

that were made by physicists when they were looking for the Higgs boson

what we've said is if we build a selection engine that basically looks for objects

that have these three timescale characteristics, then we will have made life

And so what we've got to randomly do is keep basically doing random chemistry to look for these things

And we now know what they are and we are building engines in my lab

How long is it going to take to do? I don't know. How much money is in the cost? I don't know. How many people need to help me? I don't know

But I don't think it is going to be many decades. I think we are going to be able to find

how selection produces life-like systems from sand very quickly and is really exciting