David Kipping

If you think you know what the answer is, if you look at an Earth-like planet and you are preconditioned to think there's a 90% chance of life on this planet, it's going to at some level affect your interpretation of that data.

Whereas if I, however critical you might be of the agnosticism that I impose upon myself,

remain open to both possibilities, then I trust in myself to make a fair assessment as to the reality of that evidence for life.

Yeah, and I would also say I'm open to the idea of it being part of a continuation, but the continuation maybe is more broader and it's a continuation of chemical systems and chemical networks.

And what we call this one particular type of chemistry and this behavior of chemistry life,

But it is just one manifestation of all the trillions of possible permutations in which chemical reactions can occur.

And we assert specialness to it because that's what we are.

And so it's also true of intelligence.

You could extend the same thing and say, you know, we're looking for intelligent life in the universe.

Where do you define intelligence?

Where's that continuum of something that's really like us?

Are we alone?

There may be a continuum of chemical systems, a continuum of intelligences out there, and we have to be careful of our own arrogance of assuming specialness about what we are, that we are some distinct category of...

phenomena, whereas the universe doesn't really care about what category we are.

It's just doing what it's doing and doing everything in infinite diversity and infinite combinations is essentially what it's doing.

And so we are taking this one slice and saying, no, this has to be treated separately.

And I'm open to the idea that it could be a truly separate phenomenon, but it may just be like a snowflake.

Every snowflake's different.

It may just be that this one particular iteration is another variant of the vast continuum.

Quite possibly.