Cosmic biocentrism

"With the discoveries of the Kepler satellite in the last five years, it is almost certain that life exists elsewhere in the universe. (Given the unimaginable number of habitable planets, the absence of life beyond Earth would be like the absence of fires in a million dry forests, year after year after year.) The Kepler discoveries, plus the rarity of life in time and in space discussed here, lead to a concept I will call “cosmic biocentrism.” By that, I mean that the rarity and preciousness of life provides a kinship to all living things in the universe. I cannot imagine what kinds of thoughts, what kinds of values and principles, other living beings might have. But we share something in the vast corridors of this cosmos we find ourselves in. What exactly is it we share? Certainly, the mundane attributes of “life”: the ability to separate ourselves from our surroundings, to utilize energy sources, to grow, to reproduce, to evolve. I would argue that we “conscious” beings share something more during our relatively brief moment in the “era of life”: the ability to witness and reflect on the spectacle of existence, a spectacle that is at once mysterious, joyous, tragic, trembling, majestic, confusing, comic, nurturing, unpredictable and predictable, ecstatic, beautiful, cruel, sacred, devastating, exhilarating. The cosmos will grind on for eternity long after we’re gone, cold and unobserved. But for these few powers of ten, we have been. We have seen, we have felt, we have lived."

"Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings" by Alan Lightman: https://a.co/9uRyAum