Defining Life: Assembly Theory and Creation in the Lab

Assembly Theory defines life as systems producing complexity at scale, enabling the study of life's origins and creation in the lab.

### Defining Life: Assembly Theory and the Quest for Creation
* 🔬  The concept of life is often debated, with varying definitions from biologists, but one simple definition is that life is any system capable of **producing complexity at scale**.
* 📊  To determine if a system is alive, one must calculate its **Assembly**, which reflects the **level of selection** that has occurred within the system.
* 🧮  The Assembly Index is derived by **counting identical objects** and analyzing their classes, ultimately **quantifying the amount of Assembly present**.
* 🌌  Life engages in **non-random processes at scale**, and measuring this can enhance our understanding of how life **arises and evolves** in the universe.
* 🧬  Assembly Theory not only aids in understanding the **transition from non-life to life** but also provides a framework for potentially **creating life in laboratory settings**.
* ⏳  The theory identifies three critical time parameters: the **time to create an object**, the **time it naturally deteriorates without a living system**, and the **time it can persist within a living lineage**.
* 🔧  By constructing a selection engine that targets objects with these **time characteristics**, researchers aim to **synthesize life**, with promising developments underway in the lab.
* 🚀  While the timeline and costs are uncertain, the prospect of **discovering how selection leads to lifelike systems from non-living materials** is deemed achievable in the near future.

- The description for life is very confused. You know, does it need a gene, does it need this, does it need that? And if you ask 10 different biologists what life is, you get 1000 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 the number and you sum them together, and you get this amount of Assembly. So really, this then compresses the definition of life. 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 of 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 are gonna 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 allows us to quantify life.

But even more importantly, in a way, it allows us to think about how we can make life in the lab. And because we now understand the three parameters, and those three parameters are all about time, the time to make the object, the time which the object falls apart naturally, if there's no living system, the 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 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 gotta 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 gonna take to do?

I don't know how much money it is gonna 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 gonna be able to find how selection produces lifelike systems from sand very quickly and is really exciting.

Meet the scientist that made a machine to measure life itself | Lee Cronin

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Life is defined as any system that can produce complexity at scale, with a focus on generating identical objects.

The Assembly Index, calculated by counting identical objects and measuring selection, determines if a system is alive.

Assembly Theory offers insights into the transition from non-life to life and allows for the quantification of life.

Understanding three key time parameters—object creation, natural decay, and persistence in a living lineage—has inspired a design for an origin of life machine.

The approach involves building a selection engine to identify objects with these time characteristics.

Random chemistry experiments are being conducted in the lab to find and replicate these crucial objects.

The Excitement of Finding Lifelike Systems

The speaker is uncertain about the cost and number of people needed for their project.

They believe that discovering how selection produces lifelike systems from sand will happen quickly.

The prospect of this discovery is exciting for them.