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

The world contained in this data does not operate according to the neat Newtonian rules of cause and effect but spirals into the baffling complexity of chaos theory, wherein everything is connected to everything else and even small changes have widespread repercussions. Or rather, this is the world that had always been there, lurking beyond our lim

... See more

“It would not be good news to learn that we are all roped together intellectually, droning away at some featureless, genetically driven collective work, building something so immense that we can never see the outlines,” biologist Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell (1974). Humans understandably prefer to believe in their own agency, even if ... See more

But with a spike of pleasant surprise, Miranda realized they were all like her in that moment. Products of different worlds and evolutionary paths—natural and accelerated—yet like her. The same drive to know burned in them, a convergence in the way their intellects worked, so that each species had reached the point where, faced with a mystery, they

... See more