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

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.

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.”

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

Searching for life elsewhere forces us to confront our limited understanding of what life even is.

So rather than asking how life arose on Earth, Cronin is asking How does life arise, period?

“The Kurlan civilization believed that an individual was a community of individuals. Inside us are many voices, each with its own desires, its own style, its own view of the world.”

Try as we might to imagine alien animals, what we’re really doing is finding another way to understand life here on Earth.

but for the Oankali, genetic manipulation is not distinct from nature. In fact, all of their technology, including their starfaring ship, is alive, engineered and grown from natural forms.

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.