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.

What would it be like to live with the confident knowledge, as many did during the Enlightenment, that aliens existed? I marvel at it the way I marvel about assured religious faith. I guess that shows my hand: both feel frankly speculative to me. Imagine, I sometimes think, what it would be like to face death confident of an afterlife, especially

Gould argues that “we cannot use mere survival as evidence for superiority,” as there’s no proof that our ancestors outcompeted their contemporaries.

“Science is not a collection of facts,” he said, but “a way of looking at the universe. And so by analogy, good science fiction isn’t only fiction which adheres to a specific body of facts, it can also be fiction that adheres to a certain way of thinking about the universe.”

“There is a fear of the night that is begotten of ignorance and superstition, a nightmare fear, the fear of the impossible; and there is another fear of the night—of the starlit night—that comes with knowledge, when we see in its true proportion this little life of ours...”

If those molecules bump together and form something more complex, on and on, Cronin said, “that is the selection equivalent of gravity. And that process of complexity generates everything we have in the universe that’s associated with life.”

the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Essentially, this is the idea that the structure of a language determines a native speaker’s thinking.5

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.

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