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

“If you try to communicate with them,” he said, “you are the story. And I’m more interested in them as the story.”

Carl Sagan’s more famous ideas (or sound bites): that we are living through humanity’s “technological adolescence,” in possession of new power but not yet possessed of the maturity to wield that power well.

That, Losos said, leads to the idea of an entire way of life without species. What if there were no hard boundaries between one animal and another, just “a smear of variation”?

Consciousness, then, is the ability to experience existence. It does not require intelligence, thought, or self-reflection, just the awareness of being.

(The philosophical term comes from Archimedes’s statement, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”)

Implicit in any vision of vast progress is not just longevity but continuity. The assumption of the ever upward-sloping line is bold to say the least.

Sagan wrote of it, in the book inspired by the photograph, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.... Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

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

We’re still guided by what’s called the Copernican principle, the idea that in no realm should we take humanity to be special.