Introduction

One of the seemingly intractable problems in addressing the impact of discovering life beyond Earth is the need to transcend anthropocentrism. How can we move beyond our preconceptions of basic concepts such as life and intelligence, culture and civilization, technology and communication? Unfortunately we cannot “get out of our heads,” so to speak, no matter how hard we try. But we can at least attempt to imagine a much broader spectrum of each of these concepts than are known to exist on Earth. Indeed, the best science fiction is sometimes very good at doing this. We can also attempt to escape our anthropocentrism by an empirical approach that emphasizes the diversity of life and intelligence on Earth, and potentially in the broader universe. Both natural and social scientists have begun to address these difficult problems.

In this section scholars from a great variety of backgrounds take up these issues. From his perspective in the biogeosciences Dirk Schulze-Makuch surveys the landscape of actual and possible life. He demonstrates that while the limits to life on Earth are much broader than once thought, other planets may exhibit even broader limits based on conditions specific to their planet, whether in the clouds of Venus, on dusty dry Mars, sulfur-rich Io, hydrocarbon-laden Titan, or the great variety of conditions sure to exist on the multitude of exoplanets now being discovered. All of this is based not on science fiction, but on possible real-life adaption mechanisms for life. In a similar way, neuroscientist Lori Marino examines the landscape of intelligence. Despite the importance of the concept to many fields (Sternberg, 2000; 2002), sophisticated studies in an astrobiological context have been lacking, with few exceptions (Bogonovich 2011). Decrying the lack of empirical work in this crucial area within the astrobiology community, she employs scientific data from terrestrial life to establish an expansive concept of the nature of intelligence. Intelligence, Marino argues, is not a binary property in the sense of having or lacking it, but is a continuous multi-staged and multi-leveled property based on the gradual evolution of life on Earth, beginning with the first neurons. Intelligence, she concludes, is a ubiquitous property of life on Earth; even if no life is found beyond Earth, “we are not alone,” in the famous phrase often used in the SETI context.