The Possibility of Life Quotes

“We’re not alone because we’re not separate from the swirl of a galaxy’s arms or the way wind catches dust in a gyre. We’re no more an anomaly than an atom is.”
― Jaime Green, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos

“Because it is the processes, not the molecules, the actions --- not the matter--- that makes something alive”
― Jaime Green, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos

“Even the way we envision the technological singularity is not exactly new, predating even the technology that would make it seem possible. In an 1863 article, “Darwin among the Machines,” Samuel Butler wrote (in language that Seth Shostak may have echoed to me), “Who will be man’s successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate.” Just as we panic about kids these days texting too much, so too did the ancient Greeks panic about kids those days reading the written word instead of memorizing. The fear of technology is nothing new.”
― Jaime Green, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos

“…science fiction writers may have been the first people to realize the unknowability of where technology would lead us… Where it used to be possible to set stories millennia in the future—affording human and alien characters alike a wealth of super-advanced technology—extrapolating even a few steps beyond the current moment started to lead to impossible-to-imagine futures.”
― Jaime Green, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos