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

So the fact that we’ve found ourselves struggling on Earth doesn’t mean we’re evil or lazy or stupid—or even, as Stapledon might put it, insufficiently awakened. We’re just another manifestation of life, which itself is just another manifestation of matter. And, like those who came before—whether they’re hypothetical or real—we’ve come to the point

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.”

“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.”

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.

Frank believes our culture lacks mythology. He doesn’t mean fictional stories but the big narratives that help humanity understand our world. He writes that while science has filled that gap in terms of understanding, we’re lacking the power of stories.

Across human abilities and cultures, there are myriad ways in which our sensory capabilities and even our cultures and languages render our subjective experiences of the world incomprehensible to others of our own kind.

“What that’s trying to codify,” Walker said, “is the fact that some things have so many steps to produce them that it requires a memory.” That memory can be genetic or neurological or something we can’t imagine, but the result takes too many steps to arise otherwise.

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.

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