Sara Imari Walker

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 | Antikythera

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.

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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 planetary sapience, thus helping mature the technosphere

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...

Finite Monkeys, Finite Keyboards: The Wild Alien Possibilities of Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It - Reactor Radically rethinking the origins of life on Earth and throughout the universe...

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...

Aspen Art Museum: Life As No One Knows It - Sara Imari Walker and Sophia Al-Maria Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and artist Sophia Al-Maria explore life on other worlds. Departing from Walker’s radical rethinking of the origins and definitions of life in her 2024 bo...

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?

YouTube video by Schmidt Science Fellows 2025 Interdisciplinary Science Summit Showcase Talk: Sara Walker

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

Finite Monkeys, Finite Keyboards: The Wild Alien Possibilities of Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It - Reactor Radically rethinking the origins of life on Earth and throughout the universe...

@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.

YouTube video by The Long Now Foundation Sara Imari Walker | An Informational Theory of Life | Long Now Talks

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

Glad you enjoyed it!

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.

It is a=1, not a sign of life. I expect dimethyl sulfide (if observation is confirmed) to have plenty of abiotic explanations, but exciting times none the less.

great team! ❤️

Revealing non-trivial information structures in aneural biological tissues via functional connectivity Author summary A central challenge in understanding several diverse processes in biology, including morphogenesis, wound healing, and development, is learning from empirical data how information is in...

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.