This professor of astrophysics and astrobiology at Arizona State University, has produced one of the deepest densest scientific and philosophic books that I have ever struggled through. I only persisted by looking ahead to Chapter Four and hoping it would become at least somewhat understandable when she got around to discussing aliens. Before that, I attempted to grasp what it means to a physicist to be alive, to see the world entirely as controlled by the laws of physics and chemistry, and largely failed. She quotes some colleagues who deny the existence of life, discusses free will only to dismiss its existence, and distinguishes life as being different than being live. She tries but fails to delineate the borders of life. I would be lying if I claimed to understand more than small portion of the this book. And it becomes even more confusing (to me at least) later when she introduces assembly theory, the warping of space time and a variety of other concepts unique to the world of astrophysics and astrobiology.
Amid the esoterica, I was struck by one trivial feature of nature that astounded me. If you nick a deer’s antler at a particular site, the next one that replaces it after it has been shed will have the same defect! However, the explanation of this with electrical storage in the deer’s skull seemed unsatisfactory to me.
“The boundary between the phenomena we want to think of as life, and not life, is fuzzy and may not exist at all.”
“ The trouble with recognizing alien life is that we do not know what it means to be alien or to be life.”
“…we might describe life as deep stacks of causation of objects making other objects because for any complex object to exist the memory, or constraints, if you prefer, to generate it must also exist embodied in another body.”
“We cannot see ourselves clearly because we have not built a theory of physics yet as inside the universe they are describing: that understanding is muddled across seemingly disparate concepts we refer to as ‘matter’, ‘information’, ‘causation’, ‘computation’, ‘complexity’ and ‘life.’ Assembly theory is an attempt to see all these as the same thing.”
She rejects the RNA hypothesis as being unique to living organisms, and never mentions Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestial, which almost convinced me, invoking Occam’s Razor, that we have been visited by aliens, if only briefly.
I deeply admire the intelligence of this author, but am too far removed from her erudite world to ever understand much of it.
2.5/5
Thanks, Goodreads.
The Passionate Reader 