Dr. Bruce Damer is an astrobiologist, computer scientist, and director of the BIOTA Institute at UC Santa Cruz with a compelling theory for the origin of life on Earth. Damer and his colleagues have proposed that life didn't begin at the bottom of the ocean, or at a hydrothermal vent, or in the irradiated clouds of the early Earth. They propose the formation of the earliest cells out in the open, at the margins of vernal hot spring pools filled with amino acids, minerals, and proto-nucleotides carried to Earth by a constant shower of organic-rich micrometeorites. We talk about the hardest questions on Earth, why hydrothermal vents are a dead end, why origin of life researchers don't throw hot coffee at each other any more, and how figuring out where we came from might let us keep going for long enough to reach the stars.