“We tend to oversimplify things. We think in terms of black and white. And we tend to see things from only one vantage point—our own. So we’ve looked at Earth as though it were something special, something unique, a single point for the origin of life. We don’t see Earth for what it actually is. We don’t see it as the third minor planet in orbit around an average star roughly three-quarters of the way from the center of a modest-sized galaxy, and yet that’s all it is.
