The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos
by Jaime Green
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"One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. In The Possibility of Life, acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus to our contemporary quest for exoplanets. Along the way, she interweaves insights show more from science fiction writers who construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists. Incorporating expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy research, philosophical inquiry, and pop culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek to Arrival, The Possibility of Life explores our evolving conception of the cosmos to ask an even deeper question: What does it mean to be human?" -- show lessTags
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{audiobook narrated by the author}
Analysis and musings on aliens. Not whether they actually exist, but why we humans do or do not want them to, and why we imagine that they look particular ways. What do our thoughts on aliens say about us as a species?
I really enjoyed this gentle little book, a mix of pop culture about aliens and philosophy about aliens. I have read similar books about a cultural analysis of other phenomena like zombies, but this is just so much kinder and more human than anything else. You almost don’t notice the massive amounts of research and interviews with expert scientists and writers that clearly went into it.
The author is not a professional narrator, but she’s very good (and I was already familiar with her show more voice from a few podcast episodes). show less
Analysis and musings on aliens. Not whether they actually exist, but why we humans do or do not want them to, and why we imagine that they look particular ways. What do our thoughts on aliens say about us as a species?
I really enjoyed this gentle little book, a mix of pop culture about aliens and philosophy about aliens. I have read similar books about a cultural analysis of other phenomena like zombies, but this is just so much kinder and more human than anything else. You almost don’t notice the massive amounts of research and interviews with expert scientists and writers that clearly went into it.
The author is not a professional narrator, but she’s very good (and I was already familiar with her show more voice from a few podcast episodes). show less
Jaime Green’s first book is a work of popular science, aimed to help interested amateurs like me learn about how leading scientists conduct the search for extraterrestrial life. I liked how she reframed the topic at the outset: The question is not “whether or not” but “what if?” One key insight I took from the book was that the effort already has a payoff on Earth. To search, we have to know what to look for. This involves thinking about what we mean by life and consciousness.
Despite my interest, I struggled to stay focused while reading the first two chapters. It took me a while to get used to the large number of researchers and authors she interviewed or read. By contrast, chapters Four (People) and Five (Technology) fully show more engaged me.
Among the gems I enjoyed reading about was K2-138, with six planets whose orbits resonate: For every three orbits a planet makes, the next one makes two. This ratio, translated to musical pitch, corresponds to a perfect fifth. Pythagoras would not have been surprised.
At several points, I had to stop, put the book down, and soak in what I’d just read. For instance, when Green explained how life’s presence helps make the Earth habitable, the oxygen given off by early life enabled the rise of more complex, energy-hungry beings.
Throughout the book, Green refers to many works of science fiction. She is unapologetic: “Science fiction is more than entertainment, it’s a generative act that creates new possibilities of life beyond Earth, as valid and as potent as anything we might conjure up in a lab.” I’ve read almost no science fiction, and I noted several titles. My TBR list grows longer. show less
Despite my interest, I struggled to stay focused while reading the first two chapters. It took me a while to get used to the large number of researchers and authors she interviewed or read. By contrast, chapters Four (People) and Five (Technology) fully show more engaged me.
Among the gems I enjoyed reading about was K2-138, with six planets whose orbits resonate: For every three orbits a planet makes, the next one makes two. This ratio, translated to musical pitch, corresponds to a perfect fifth. Pythagoras would not have been surprised.
At several points, I had to stop, put the book down, and soak in what I’d just read. For instance, when Green explained how life’s presence helps make the Earth habitable, the oxygen given off by early life enabled the rise of more complex, energy-hungry beings.
Throughout the book, Green refers to many works of science fiction. She is unapologetic: “Science fiction is more than entertainment, it’s a generative act that creates new possibilities of life beyond Earth, as valid and as potent as anything we might conjure up in a lab.” I’ve read almost no science fiction, and I noted several titles. My TBR list grows longer. show less
I was expecting this to be all about the current state of the scientific search for life on other planets, but it is so much more than that! Green does talk about science, but she spends more time focusing on literature and media, analyzing science fiction and what it has to say about life on other planets. This is a delightful synthesis of literary analysis and science. Ultimately, the search for life on other planets is really a quest to understand our own existence.
Green discusses the various means scientists have used to detect life on other planets, and what that other life might look like. She describes what we know and don't know about the origin of life on our own planet, and speculation about whether life is likely to be show more abundant, or is a freak occurrence on Earth. She also looks at books, movies, and TV shows about first contact, and what those have to say not only about the potential reality, but about our own hopes and fears.
There is a lot of delightful food for thought in this book! show less
Green discusses the various means scientists have used to detect life on other planets, and what that other life might look like. She describes what we know and don't know about the origin of life on our own planet, and speculation about whether life is likely to be show more abundant, or is a freak occurrence on Earth. She also looks at books, movies, and TV shows about first contact, and what those have to say not only about the potential reality, but about our own hopes and fears.
There is a lot of delightful food for thought in this book! show less
This was such an engaging and fascinating book to read! I loved how Green was able to guide the reader through explorations of real life science through the lens of more familiar and accessible science fiction stories and speculations. As someone who is a big sci-fi reader/lover myself, I found this to be a deeply helpful method of understanding theories and concepts that are perhaps a little more complex. In addition, the overall attitude Green has towards the idea of extraterrestrial life is one full of curiosity and compassion, and is just totally palpable through the pages, embedding it with a justified sort of hopefulness.
Personally, I found one of the most engaging discussions to be the idea of contemplating what “life” show more actually is, and might look like were humans to encounter it elsewhere. This isn’t just limited to how a physical alien body might look, but the many ways in which we as humans would even be able to realize life is there or happening. It helped me shift my perspective into a more broadminded one, away from more linear, anthropocentric ways of thinking. show less
Personally, I found one of the most engaging discussions to be the idea of contemplating what “life” show more actually is, and might look like were humans to encounter it elsewhere. This isn’t just limited to how a physical alien body might look, but the many ways in which we as humans would even be able to realize life is there or happening. It helped me shift my perspective into a more broadminded one, away from more linear, anthropocentric ways of thinking. show less
Green has written a fascinating exploration about the possibility of discovering alien life, and how our search for life elsewhere in the cosmos informs our understanding of our own life here on Earth. The fascinating parts are how she uses fiction and film to discuss our explorations -- anything from Star Trek to A Wrinkle in Time. The bibliography is a treasure trove of knowledge all by itself.
Very fun mix of science, speculation, and sci-fi/pop culture references regarding life on other planets. I've certainly read books like this before, and while this one is the best so far, they are always vaguely unsatisfying, and I think that's because we haven't found that life yet. It's always speculation and educated guesses. This clearly isn't the fault of anyone, least of all the author, but still, show me those aliens.
Delightful survey of the science (and science fiction) of pondering the possibility of life in the cosmos. From the popular depictions of Star Wars and Star Trek to many SF examples familiar and not to in depth review of and conversations with a wide range of scientists, Green really takes the reader on a wonderful survey of the prospect of alien life. Recommended!
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In 1960 the American astronomer Frank Drake initiated Project Ozma, a pioneering attempt to detect radio signals from the vicinity of nearby stars. Several months of observation failed to detect any aliens and doomed the project. Drake’s curiosity, however, was undimmed, so, in the absence of telescope time, he decided to estimate the number of civilizations likely to reside in the Milky show more Way. The resulting Drake Equation has been a lodestone for space exploration ever since, not because Drake could quantify the odds of encountering intelligent aliens – it remains impossible to put numbers on any of the equation’s variables – but because it provides a thoughtful listing of what we need to know to interpret the question: are we alone in the universe?
Is our planet a cosmic singularity, unique among the billions of known galaxies, each with billions of stars? Or is the universe pulsing with life, some of it bacterial, some of it intelligent, perhaps benevolent, perhaps menacing? The issue has been pondered at least since Galileo recognized stars that wander across the night sky as planets, much like the Earth and perhaps equally endowed with life. Twenty-first-century astrobiologists, armed with spacecraft and telescopes, commonly focus on “how” we might detect extraterrestrial life, but other creative minds ask “what if?”. What might alien life be like, and what would happen should we meet it? Over the years writers and film-makers have imagined a universe of possibilities, from the brutal invaders of The War of the Worlds to ET. In The Possibility of Life Jaime Green skilfully interweaves fact and fiction, interviews and close reading, as she explores who or what might populate the heavens.
Earth is the only place in the universe known to harbour life, so our own story strongly informs human imaginings about extraterrestrial beings. With this in mind Green structures her narrative around key events in the journey from primordial planet to technological mankind, beginning with life’s origin and proceeding through the emergence of complex multicellular organisms to humans and technology – all key parameters in the Drake Equation. Life as we know it began on a rocky planet with lots of water and no oxygen. Simple molecules containing carbon and a few other elements came together and, with energy supplied by heat, lightning, solar radiation or radioactive decay, reacted to form amino acids, lipids and nucleotides – the building blocks of life. Chemical reactions of increasing complexity ensued, eventually leading to entities that could grow, reproduce and evolve. Is any part of this scenario likely to be universal? Rocky planets or moons with liquid water are a good start. The chemistry thought to underpin life’s origins doesn’t work in the presence of oxygen gas, so an anoxic atmosphere and oceans are also likely. Moreover, as Green points out, carbon has properties that make it particularly bio-friendly, so life elsewhere will probably be carbon-based, as it is on Earth. And evolution seems necessary to put developmental distance between the physical and biological worlds.
From here, however, the list of possibilities expands exponentially. Life is hard to imagine without a capacity for storing and using information, interacting with the environment and heredity; but will alien life include DNA and proteins, chromosomes and membranes? We don’t know, and the potential evolutionary pathways continue to spiral outward as we contemplate complex organisms such as animals, with trillions of cells all working in remarkable co-ordination. Will multicellular aliens resemble us, or Earth-bound animals in general? Green cites the late Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that, if we could play Earth’s evolutionary tape again, the results would look different, with technological intelligence a vanishingly small probability.
Extinction prunes the tree of life, and mass extinctions prune it in ways that have little to do with adaptations over preceding epochs. Yet there is a clear vector to life’s history, and it runs straight through extinction episodes. Moreover, similar forms have evolved repeatedly, suggesting a measure of predictability in evolution. But, while the convergent shapes of fish, whales and plesiosaurs reflect common adaptations for movement in water, they are also constrained by descent from a common ancestor. Half a century ago the French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that evolution is like a tinkerer, fashioning novelty from materials on hand. For the descendants of any given ancestor, there may be only so many viable evolutionary pathways, limiting the universal application of our specific evolutionary history.
For most of our planet’s history, visiting aliens would have found only microbes in the biosphere. Animals emerged in just the most recent 15 per cent of life’s story, and only in the latest blink of a cosmic eye would such visitors have encountered anything capable of agriculture, automobiles or computers. Humans are evolutionary newcomers, characterized by distinctive genes, morphology and physiology, but also consciousness, philosophy and morality – “reason and reflection”, in the words of John Locke. A key aspect of modern humanity is technology, which has developed at an astonishing pace relative to the biological evolution that gave rise to us in the first place. Given this technological trajectory, what might terrestrial life look like 50,000 years from now? Green explores this question carefully and insightfully. Will humanity eventually give way to intelligent machines, with potential parallels in other solar systems? Both writers and scientists have entertained the idea, however unlikely it may seem. The astronomer Steven J. Dick has even proposed an order of succession: on long timescales, he argues, biology overtakes physics as the primary force shaping the cosmos, before invention overtakes biology.
The possibilities of life turn out to be nearly limitless, although our ability to imagine them is tethered to terrestrial experience – and, in practice, the search for life beyond the Earth will need to focus on what life does, not what it is. Astrobiologists will scour the heavens for observable patterns not likely to be generated by physical processes alone: molecules of chlorophyll-like complexity in Martian sediments, co-existing oxygen and methane in the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets, or radio waves and Dyson spheres (imagined constructions capable of capturing a galaxy’s energy) in deep space. Maybe, too, we won’t find them – they’ll find us.
Contact has long motivated science fiction. Humans have community, and we attempt to extend that community to other terrestrial intelligences such as dolphins and octopuses. There are already difficulties with that extension, and still more when we contemplate community with intelligences from space. Problems of communication run both ways. If aliens intercept the Pioneer spacecraft, with their inscribed aluminium plaques, will they grasp the nature of its senders or simply scratch their heads (if they have them)? Will aliens want to help us, or not? Or, as Mary Doria Russell imagines in The Sparrow (1996), a novel inspired by the history of European exploration, might it be human explorers who bring catastrophe to the worlds they discover?
An observation halfway through Jaime Green’s book neatly sums up the attempt to conjure a sense of alien life: “Even if we can’t imagine truly strange, truly different life, we push against the inherent xenophobia of our imaginations when we try, while what we know pulls us back like gravity”. The Possibility of Life is powered by just this combination of curiosity and resistance. It is an entertaining and instructive rumination on both earthbound existence and the prospect of extraterrestrial encounter.
Andrew H. Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. His most recent book is A Brief History of Earth: Four billion years in eight chapters, 2021 show less
Is our planet a cosmic singularity, unique among the billions of known galaxies, each with billions of stars? Or is the universe pulsing with life, some of it bacterial, some of it intelligent, perhaps benevolent, perhaps menacing? The issue has been pondered at least since Galileo recognized stars that wander across the night sky as planets, much like the Earth and perhaps equally endowed with life. Twenty-first-century astrobiologists, armed with spacecraft and telescopes, commonly focus on “how” we might detect extraterrestrial life, but other creative minds ask “what if?”. What might alien life be like, and what would happen should we meet it? Over the years writers and film-makers have imagined a universe of possibilities, from the brutal invaders of The War of the Worlds to ET. In The Possibility of Life Jaime Green skilfully interweaves fact and fiction, interviews and close reading, as she explores who or what might populate the heavens.
Earth is the only place in the universe known to harbour life, so our own story strongly informs human imaginings about extraterrestrial beings. With this in mind Green structures her narrative around key events in the journey from primordial planet to technological mankind, beginning with life’s origin and proceeding through the emergence of complex multicellular organisms to humans and technology – all key parameters in the Drake Equation. Life as we know it began on a rocky planet with lots of water and no oxygen. Simple molecules containing carbon and a few other elements came together and, with energy supplied by heat, lightning, solar radiation or radioactive decay, reacted to form amino acids, lipids and nucleotides – the building blocks of life. Chemical reactions of increasing complexity ensued, eventually leading to entities that could grow, reproduce and evolve. Is any part of this scenario likely to be universal? Rocky planets or moons with liquid water are a good start. The chemistry thought to underpin life’s origins doesn’t work in the presence of oxygen gas, so an anoxic atmosphere and oceans are also likely. Moreover, as Green points out, carbon has properties that make it particularly bio-friendly, so life elsewhere will probably be carbon-based, as it is on Earth. And evolution seems necessary to put developmental distance between the physical and biological worlds.
From here, however, the list of possibilities expands exponentially. Life is hard to imagine without a capacity for storing and using information, interacting with the environment and heredity; but will alien life include DNA and proteins, chromosomes and membranes? We don’t know, and the potential evolutionary pathways continue to spiral outward as we contemplate complex organisms such as animals, with trillions of cells all working in remarkable co-ordination. Will multicellular aliens resemble us, or Earth-bound animals in general? Green cites the late Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that, if we could play Earth’s evolutionary tape again, the results would look different, with technological intelligence a vanishingly small probability.
Extinction prunes the tree of life, and mass extinctions prune it in ways that have little to do with adaptations over preceding epochs. Yet there is a clear vector to life’s history, and it runs straight through extinction episodes. Moreover, similar forms have evolved repeatedly, suggesting a measure of predictability in evolution. But, while the convergent shapes of fish, whales and plesiosaurs reflect common adaptations for movement in water, they are also constrained by descent from a common ancestor. Half a century ago the French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that evolution is like a tinkerer, fashioning novelty from materials on hand. For the descendants of any given ancestor, there may be only so many viable evolutionary pathways, limiting the universal application of our specific evolutionary history.
For most of our planet’s history, visiting aliens would have found only microbes in the biosphere. Animals emerged in just the most recent 15 per cent of life’s story, and only in the latest blink of a cosmic eye would such visitors have encountered anything capable of agriculture, automobiles or computers. Humans are evolutionary newcomers, characterized by distinctive genes, morphology and physiology, but also consciousness, philosophy and morality – “reason and reflection”, in the words of John Locke. A key aspect of modern humanity is technology, which has developed at an astonishing pace relative to the biological evolution that gave rise to us in the first place. Given this technological trajectory, what might terrestrial life look like 50,000 years from now? Green explores this question carefully and insightfully. Will humanity eventually give way to intelligent machines, with potential parallels in other solar systems? Both writers and scientists have entertained the idea, however unlikely it may seem. The astronomer Steven J. Dick has even proposed an order of succession: on long timescales, he argues, biology overtakes physics as the primary force shaping the cosmos, before invention overtakes biology.
The possibilities of life turn out to be nearly limitless, although our ability to imagine them is tethered to terrestrial experience – and, in practice, the search for life beyond the Earth will need to focus on what life does, not what it is. Astrobiologists will scour the heavens for observable patterns not likely to be generated by physical processes alone: molecules of chlorophyll-like complexity in Martian sediments, co-existing oxygen and methane in the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets, or radio waves and Dyson spheres (imagined constructions capable of capturing a galaxy’s energy) in deep space. Maybe, too, we won’t find them – they’ll find us.
Contact has long motivated science fiction. Humans have community, and we attempt to extend that community to other terrestrial intelligences such as dolphins and octopuses. There are already difficulties with that extension, and still more when we contemplate community with intelligences from space. Problems of communication run both ways. If aliens intercept the Pioneer spacecraft, with their inscribed aluminium plaques, will they grasp the nature of its senders or simply scratch their heads (if they have them)? Will aliens want to help us, or not? Or, as Mary Doria Russell imagines in The Sparrow (1996), a novel inspired by the history of European exploration, might it be human explorers who bring catastrophe to the worlds they discover?
An observation halfway through Jaime Green’s book neatly sums up the attempt to conjure a sense of alien life: “Even if we can’t imagine truly strange, truly different life, we push against the inherent xenophobia of our imaginations when we try, while what we know pulls us back like gravity”. The Possibility of Life is powered by just this combination of curiosity and resistance. It is an entertaining and instructive rumination on both earthbound existence and the prospect of extraterrestrial encounter.
Andrew H. Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. His most recent book is A Brief History of Earth: Four billion years in eight chapters, 2021 show less
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- Original publication date
- 2023
- First words
- When I was very little, I was scared of the night sky. (p. 13)
- Quotations
- H.G. Wells wrote of a similar feeling in an essay from 1894: "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 -... (show all) of the starlit night - that comes with knowledge, wen we see in its true proportion this little life of ours..." (p. 36)
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 posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the ... (show all)Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark." (p. 65)
The moon's influence seems to keep the Earth in a sweet spot of stability - neither too static that life is never challenged to evolve nor so changeable that the environment becomes hostile. (p. 86)
Consciousness, then, is the ability to experience existence. It does not require intelligence, thought, or self-reflection, just the awareness of being. (p. 154)
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