For centuries, if not millennia, we have looked towards the night sky and with the glory of the Milky Way, now enhanced beyond earlier imagination by the extraordinary pictures captured by such great telescopes as the Hubble and Keck, felt a deep resonance, a wider and wilder reality, a glimpse of a cosmic architecture. Naturally enough such an awestruck view has also enfolded the prospect of other habitable worlds. Yet it is only quite recently that a deeper, more pervasive view has emerged that looks beyond the question of extraterrestrials to invoke organic activity on a truly universal scale, life as a cosmic imperative. In the previous chapter I mentioned Christian de Duve, and perhaps he best of all encapsulates this wider and more optimistic view that the Universe is not a howling wilderness, but part of our home. Thus he writes, the ‘Universe is a hotbed of organic syntheses leading among others, to amino acids and other typical building blocks of life. This ‘vital dust’ permeates the entire Universe and most likely represents the chemical seeds from which life arose.’ Nor is de Duve the only exponent of life as a cosmic principle. Cyril Ponnamperuma, for example, has stated that ‘You look at the interstellar molecules and you see cyanide and formaldehyde. These two can provide the pathway for everything else. There is a simplicity in the whole scheme – so much so that you practically feel that the whole universe is trying to make life.’