The Secret Of Our Success

The Universe Contains Vastly More Order Than Earth-life Could Ever Demand. All Those Distant Galaxies, Irrelevant For Our Existence, Seem As Equally Well Ordered As Our Own.

If You Get A Drill And Drill Down 5km Beneath The Ground, It's Teeming With Life - Millions Of Tiny Living Fossils. They Resemble The Earliest Life Forms And Suggest That Life Started Under The Ground. The Bible Talks Of Eden As A Sunny Parkland With White Fluffy Clouds, But It Probably Ascended From The Region That We Now Associate With Hell.

It's Only Fashion That Has Said The Pendulum Has Swung From Extreme Skepticism About Extraterrestrial Life To Extreme Credulity. The Truth Is Somewhere In Between.

What We Want Is Another Sample Of Life, Which Is Not On Our Tree Of Life At All. All Life That We've Studied So Far On Earth Belongs To The Same Tree. We Share Genes With Mushrooms And Oak Trees And Fish And Bacteria That Live In Volcanic Vents And So On That It's All The Same Life Descended From A Common Origin. What We Want Is A Second Tree Of Life. We Want Alien Life, Alien Not Necessarily In The Sense Of Having Come From Space, But Alien In The Sense Of Belonging To A Different Tree Altogether. That Is What We're Looking For, "life 2.0."

Many Billions Of Years Will Elapse Before The Smallest, Youngest Stars Complete Their Nuclear Burning And Shrink Into White Dwarfs. But With Slow, Agonizing Finality Perpetual Night Will Surely Fall.