Episode Details

Mars may not be lifeless after all—and Michael Wong’s idea of a “second arrow of time” changes how we think about life, complexity, and astrobiology. In this condensed summary of Brian Keating’s Into The Impossible conversation with Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science, you’ll get the core insights from the full episode in minutes instead of the full-length listen. Wong explains the law of increasing functional information, why function is hard to define, and how selection for static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation may shape evolution. The discussion also explores how machine learning can help distinguish living from nonliving samples, what mineral evolution reveals about Earth, and why life beyond Earth may not resemble life on Earth. Listen now to get the key ideas in minutes.