Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey among the Exoplanets in Search of Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity Animals

"Compared to Carroll’s book, this book is even more speculative, because it’s speculating about alternative biologies. The problem is that we have just one example of biology, the one that happened on Earth. Everything on Earth—from a fungal spore to a blue whale, to a redwood tree—is the same biological experiment. We don’t know what a different biological experiment would lead to, or what the creatures and life forms that emerge would look like. If you vary from the one example we know, you’re immediately in the realm of pure speculation. It’s a tricky business because we simply don’t know. I enjoyed the book. I did have a little asterisk in my head as I read it saying, ‘Wait a minute! We don’t know that that could happen or that it would be like that!’ But they’re imagining the possibilities of biology if it wasn’t the way it is here—which is fair game, given that we don’t know. You could call it science fiction at some level, though they do have a scientific core to what they’re writing about. For example, they’ll say, ‘Well, if gravity was stronger, you wouldn’t get tall creatures, you’d have squat creatures. If the atmosphere had a different composition, you’d have this or if you had deep oceans, you might have that.’ They can speculate by a small extrapolation from things on Earth. But when it gets really weird, we basically have no idea. Yes, I’ve met James Trefil a couple of times. He’s written dozens of books, many more than I have. He’s a physicist. Michael Summers is a planetary scientist. They’re combining their knowledge because they have slightly different expertise. I’m sure it was a lot of fun for them to write. I know Trefil’s other books and they’re straight down the line about some scientific topic. This is the book where they got to go way outside the box. Science fiction has been rife with imagined worlds for decades. It’s been played out in so many different ways that it’s hard to think of any particular example. It’s part of the wallpaper to have strange planets. Sometimes the science fiction anticipates fact, like the Tatooine planet in Star Wars . It’s an Earth-like planet that orbits a double star. We found one of those, long after Star Wars was filmed and written. That was kind of cool. Yes, the Romans and the Greeks speculated about all manner of things. There is Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) book too, which I read in translation. It’s about going to the moon and the creatures living on it. These were prescient things to write about. People think science fiction has been around a century or two, but it’s quite a lot older than that. Kepler is not a very readable author. Or maybe it comes down to the translation. He was a mystic. I haven’t read all of his books, but I’ve read major chunks of Harmony of the World and it’s quite dense. It’s pretty rough going, actually. Somnium is his work of fantasy and it’s still a little dense. As a writer, he’s not a great stylist. The image I always have of Giordano Bruno is that statue in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome—this hooded figure in his cowl. It’s such a happy piazza with markets and people drinking coffee and talking. Then there’s this looming figure of someone who was burned at the stake right there 400 years ago. It’s a little somber. He speculated amazingly and widely about the stars being other suns. That was very far ahead of his time. And then why not have planets around them? And why not have creatures on the planets? And why not have creatures that are as smart or as advanced as we are? He went the whole way. “If intelligent life is thinly scattered through the galaxy, then operationally we’re alone” Now, a misleading thing that has happened is he’s been characterized as a martyr for science. He was burned for religious heresy. His rap sheet has this wonderful phrase that he was “an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.” He held extremely unconventional views within the umbrella of the Catholic church and that’s what got him into trouble. I don’t think the science speculation is why he was martyred. Scientists took that narrative and ran with it, but I don’t think it’s quite right. Galileo almost suffered the same fate and that was because of his scientific views."