Findings

What is life? That was the first question at my last festival event of the weekend--which was sold out, like every other event I attended. However you measure it, the festival looked like a hit: packed halls, riveting speakers, belly laughs, probing questions, subtle answers, and diverse crowds of audience members blocking the sidewalks afterward as they continued the debates.

Anyway, what is life? If you believe Steven Benner, a synthetic biologist, it’s a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist, thinks it’s all about information reproduction and processing: “No system other then life or a product of life processes complex information,” he says. And astrobiologist Margaret Turnbull is impatient with the very question. “As soon as we make a definition, it’s only a matter of time before it’s proved limited. I would much rather get out there and look for it and see what it’s like,” she says.

Okay, so the environment is going to hell in a hand basket (see “Are We Doomed?” below). But is there anything we can do to change the basket’s direction? That’s what seven scientists and environmental activists got together to discuss yesterday evening before a high-energy audience at New York University.

Scientists have known for decades that the carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere is warming the planet, said science writer Andrew Revkin, the moderator. So why is it taking us so long to stop it? After all, we quickly passed legislation banning chlorofluorocarbons after scientists--including panelist Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who won a Nobel Prize for the work--showed the connection between the chemicals and the hole in the atmospheric ozone layer.

Rowland pointed out that while chlorofluorocarbons were used mainly in affluent countries, the whole world burns CO2-producing fossil fuels (or would, if it could afford them). And carbon dioxide, added inventor Saul Griffith of Makani Power, “lives a very long time in the atmosphere. You can stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere, you can shut off the tap, but it’s very hard to make the existing CO2 go away.”