Life’s Solution – an inconvenient truth for sci-fi lovers?

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I've just finished reading Simon Conway Morris's "Life's Solution" for the second time.

This book is often viewed as his attempt to "defend(s) his belief that evolutionary science is misguided without a somewhat religious notion of the significance of human intelligence and existence" (Amazon.com review), although I didn't find much religious statement, except for the last paragraph of the final chapter.

What the reader would find, instead, be a densely constructed argument that the laws of nature limit the course of evolution (convergence) so that if an intelligent sentient species was to evolve, they would've had a set of biological attributes very similar to ours. This argument formed the second part of this remarkable book. So it seems we or our descendants would never encounter either a bug-eyed, shapeshifting or gaseous alien species. Hmmm. Rather boring proposition for us sci-fi lovers, isn't it? 🙁

But even worse for us was the suggestion in the first part. Considering the physical and chemical faculties of the Earth and the Solar system, in comparison to the observations made with regard to physical conditions of other stars in our Galaxy and beyond, as well as the probable chemical conditions of those outer worlds deduced from the observed physical data, it seems our planet and star system are indeed unique. According to Conway Morris, the chances are that the Earth is the only one planet habitable by sentient intelligent organisms in the entire galaxy, or even the entire cosmos. That's even more depressing proposition to the sci-fi buffs. :awww:

The book was a good read, even for the second time. But when I return this book to the library tomorrow, I'll definitely borrow some sci-fi classic. I need something strong to shake off this interstellar depression. We are not alone, at least in our imagination, right!? :spock:

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  1. Originally posted by mimi_s_mum:

    "Need a Cray 1024 !!"I don't think I follow you. You are not talking about French cookery course for a crayfish bisque, are you

    Originally posted by arduinna:

    No doubt that there are some clues of life on Earth

    I think this one might make a tasty bisque :DIllustration of genus Sancracarius as appeared at Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation website (http://www.burgess-shale.bc.ca/discover/ancient-creatures/sanctacaris)

  2. You have about as much chance trying to steer blog comments as you have finding inhabited planets 😆

  3. I could almost hear that mechanic voice …"Resistance is futile … " :spock:Are you back at home, DH?

  7. Through his Foundation and Robots books, the great Isaac Asimov postulated that we will find carbon-based plant and animal life to be common throughout our galaxy, but that homo sapiens will be the only sentient life. His reasoning is that on most planets, life will evolve too slowly to achieve the ability for interstellar travel during the lifetime of a planet. Earth (a forgotten myth in the world of his books) had unique initial conditions: An unusually large moon to stir the primordial soup (We've discovered hundreds of moons in and beyond our solar system – all are 1% or less of their host planet's diameter, ours is 25%) – plus an unusually high level of background radiation to trigger the genetic mutations necessary for fast evolution.

  8. Thank you for your comment, Richard, and welcome to my site. Interesting you've brought up Asimov. It was a long time ago I read Foundation and I completely forgot the background of the stories. (Or I was too young and wasn't interested in such things. I was more of an action hero worship chick and in love of the lensmans) When he wrote the bulk of his work 60 years ago, he did not have access to most of the knowledge we now take for granted. Still the universe he created has uncanny resemblances to what described in Conway Morris's book.

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