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

“Definitions tell us about the meanings of words in our language, as opposed to telling us about the nature of the world.” She says that what we need is not a definition but a theory, to know not what the word life means to us, but what life is. But with neither a theory nor a definition, we’re left with our intuition, entirely shaped by the life

He offers her something else often found in religion: a broader context within which to understand the Earth. By expanding our sense of the scope of the world, science fiction (and fantasy) “have the same central function as myth and theology,”

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.

“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.

(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.”)

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

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

“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.”