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

It wasn’t just that they didn’t have the necessary facts. Instead, Traphagan writes, they were limited by the boundaries a culture places on what is imaginable.

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

Sagan was a fabulist, if not as a scientist, then as a steward of our imaginations. He wanted us to imagine weird aliens, to shatter our anthropocentric habits. If not for scientific reasons, then for spiritual ones. There’s a cosmic humility to be found in understanding that we’re just one of life’s infinitely diverse expressions. Even if we can’t

“Life is a copiously branching bush,” Gould writes, “continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.”

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.

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.

(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.)

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

Is language reflective of a culture’s values and worldview, or does it limit the possibilities of experience?