The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos

What if? is not a linear path to knowledge but a circular one, spiraling recursively toward deeper and deeper understanding.

The anthropologist and nature writer Loren Eiseley writes, “There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.” Surrounded by animals, he says, we humans find ourselves separated from our natural kin by self-awareness, by language, by history.

“Definitions tell us about the meanings of words in our language, as opposed to telling us about the nature of the world.” She says that what we need is not a definition but a theory, to know not what the word life means to us, but what life is. But with neither a theory nor a definition, we’re left with our intuition, entirely shaped by the life w

(Druyan told me this was because Sagan’s number-one rule for writing an alien was never to show them, never to collapse the possibilities of imagination into anything you could clearly see.)

So another way to understand a person is as an entity with whom you can enter into a contract—and I mean that not as a legal framework but a sort of ethical one. A social contract. With a person, your choices are not just dominate and care for. A person is an entity with whom you must treat.

The more Méndez learned about life on Earth, the more he saw how special it was—and, potentially, how rare. “You realize how special Earth is in this process. And so my thinking was now, well, extraterrestrial life is not that interesting to me... Home is your most interesting thing.” So why keep looking to the skies? “Because I learn more. From st

“I think that really misses the point, mainly because, if you think about it, the most important thing we’re doing in this century is inventing our successors.” He thinks that most of the intelligence in the universe, abundant as it may be, is likely synthetic.

He proposes that on these massive time scales, which he calls Stapledonian, first biology overtakes physics as the prime shaping force in the cosmos, and then cultural evolution overtakes biology as the driving force in society. And, he believes, the shift to cultural evolution leads to a postbiological regime, “one in which the majority of intelli

In other words, any society that doesn’t use any means possible to make its people more intelligent risks its own doom. “[C]ulture may have many driving forces,” Dick writes, “but none can be so fundamental, or so strong, as intelligence itself.”