The ProjecTAfter authors Chris Impey and Heather Green worked to-gether on a series of posters in which artist Green layered Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of diatoms with imagery of computer circuitry and dark matter, Chris Impey approached Green with the idea of creating seven pieces that would capture the es-sence of each of the chapters in his popular book on astrobiol-ogy, The Living Cosmos [1].

Over several meetings in Green’s studio, the two discussed how the content of each chapter could be expressed visually. Green created conceptual sketches of materials and themes that could serve as metaphors for larger ideas in the book (and that served as the basis for the shadow box designs pre-sented below), and Impey followed with prosaic writing that complemented these sketches, as can be seen in the follow-ing sections of this paper, which draw from those passages. As ideas developed, they became less literal, and in the process of their distillation a kind of logic evolved. The conversations resulted in an inspiring exchange of knowledge, and the ico-nography for the project emerged. The pieces are tethered to the sequential development of the book, but they can be observed in any order; the motifs build on one another and are interconnected, like the web of life [2].

The choice of working with shadow boxes was intentional—it allowed Green to work with found objects and 2- and 3D materials that were relevant to the work and to reference mu-seums and scientific specimens (especially the tradition of the Wunderkammer [3]) and the constructions of Joseph Cornell, who created several boxes with astronomical themes [4].

The Unfinished RevolutionThe first chapter of The Living Cosmos sets the stage for the field of astrobiology. The history of astronomy has seen us continually displaced from our presumed centrality in the universe [5]. We inhabit a hospitable but not atypical rocky planet orbiting a moderate-weight, middle-aged star near the periphery of a normal spiral galaxy, one of billions in the ex-panding universe. Astrobiology is an interdisciplinary effort to discover if life on Earth is special and unique or if we live in a biological universe.

In the first art piece, from the viewer’s vantage point on a shore, night sky shades imperceptibly into noctilucent sea (Fig. 1). Familiar surfaces—a glassy sea, the hemi-spheric vault of the sky—seem proximate but each contains vast depths and each might host un-known and unseen creatures. The shore represents a boundary be-tween knowledge and ignorance, dreams and reality. The macrocos-mic and the microcosmic face each other as mirrors.

©2010 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 435–441, 2010 435

a R T i s T s ’ a R T i c l e

The Living Cosmos: A Fabric That Binds Art and Science

Chris Impey and Heather Green

Chris Impey (scientist, educator), Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, U.S.A. E-mail: <cimpey@as.arizona.edu>.

Heather Green (artist, educator), Pima Community College and University of Arizona, 515 E. 20th Street, Tucson, AZ 85701, U.S.A. E-mail: <cartagrafia@gmail.com>.

See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/43/5> for supplemental files related to this article.

a b s T R a c T

The authors, an astronomer and an artist, have collaborated on a series of seven mixed-media constructions and prose pieces that follow the flow and themes of Impey’s book on astrobiology, The Living Cosmos. The book summarizes recent research on astrobiology, from the origin of life on Earth and its environmental range on this planet to the search for life in the solar system and beyond. The artist’s work encapsulates these ideas with its use of mate-rial objects, textures, images and metaphors that mirror the elements of the scientific approach to astrobiology.

Fig. 1. Heather Green, The Unfinished Revolution, oil on panel, etched clock crystals, etched copper, steel and wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in, 2007. (© Heather Green)

436 Impey and Green, The Living Cosmos

Italian of Galileo as he communicated science to the general public, Newton’s English as he explained the enigma of gravity and the German of Einstein and his theories of relativity.

The forms are timeless yet modern. A flat horizon conveys infinite extent and posits Earth as both the beginning and end of the universe, but the clock crystals, by breaking the plane, refer to Einstein’s curved universe and his coupling of space and time [8]. Comforting bound-aries melt away. The straight edge of sea is the limb of a gently curving planet, with no up or down. There is no shel-tering sky, and the air shades smoothly into the perfect vacuum of deep space. Greek philosophers flinched at the idea of a universe with no edge, or an edge yet nothing beyond the edge. The universe might be boundless, limited by time and not space, our view defined by the dis-tance that light has traveled since the big bang. All that we see is only a tiny fraction of the physical universe [9].

life’s OriginsThe Living Cosmos continues its story by going back to 4 billion years ago, a time since which all traces of biology have been churned into the restless Earth, when the motor of life first turned over. Chemical shards slowly assembled by trial and error into chunks of RNA and then into the rudiments of a working cell [10]. From a simple beginning, Darwin’s “end-less forms most beautiful and wonderful” have evolved to carpet the planet.

In the second work, an old man and his grandson regard a night scene (Fig. 2). Their starry silhouettes are a remin- der that we are all stardust, our genera-tions of atoms cycled through cosmic cauldrons. The Moon was our first guide to tracking deep time, the word itself coming from a Greek root meaning “to measure.” Its cratered surface is a mir-ror of the Earth’s violent history and the random impacts that disrupt evolu-tion [11]. Yet it also stabilizes the Earth’s orbit, making the planet more convivial to biology. More recently, we have min-iaturized our timekeeping, using vibra-tions of atoms, the precise shimmering of light waves and the radioactive decay of massive atoms—the clocks in the rock. Below us, the book of life is laid out like crumpled pages in the strata beneath our feet. The story of evolution on Earth can be parsed from the slowly mutating base pairs of DNA, but this information de-grades with time, like paper turning to dust [12]. So little remains after eons of geological activity that reanimating a di-nosaur from its blood sucked by an insect

we are, formed from a universal bio-chemistry [7].

The concave clock crystals in the cen-ter of the image draw us in and place us at the center of the scene. They are pri-meval forms, perfect and Pythagorean, numbering five to represent the Platonic solids, the moving objects in the night sky or the Greek elements. The curved surface might be a cornea or the lens of an early telescope. The nested spheres allude to mathematical harmony, to Dante’s cosmology and to the onion skin of knowledge. They move inward in time, with exterior shells closer to the origin, like the growing bubbles of light that surround every star. They are etched in languages that bespeak the history of science: Greek from Plato’s Academy, the Latin of Copernicus in his book that shocked and displaced the world, the

At the bottom of the image, an in-complete periodic table symbolizes the scientific process. We look for patterns in nature, in a process that began when the first civilizations began to track the cycles of time in the sky. Scientists work with fragments of knowledge to infer the whole: an extinct creature from a few scattered bones, the history of animals from the 1% of their bones that are fossilized [6] and the commonality of life from the overlap of scraps of DNA. The power of science lies in its projec-tive capability. Newton used the orbits of a few planets to infer the motions of galaxies that would not be discovered until centuries after his death. The pe-riodic table is universal. Stars are made of the same ingredients as the Sun, and if planets around some of them host life, it will be made of the same stuff as

Fig. 2. Heather Green, Life’s Origins, oil on panel, etched glass, specimen jar with sand, ash, crystal, sculpted book page strata, wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in, 2007. (© Heather Green)

Impey and Green, The Living Cosmos 437

an organism from scratch [16]. Humans may be heading toward a post-biological future, when we pass through the mem-brane of progress to a point where tech-nology usurps the organism [17]. There is tension between the reductionist view of life fostered by genetics and our sus-picion that there is something special about the spark of life.

Humans are temporary visitors in an overwhelmingly microbial world. The modern tree of life based on DNA places us and all other animals as a peripheral twig [18]. Genetic diversity and complex-ity at the microscopic level are amazing. We are not quite as special as we think—we share half our DNA with yeast and we have no more genes than some much-simpler organisms. There are far more microbes in one person’s gut than there are people on the planet, and there is

and then trapped in amber would be like trying to reconstruct a library from a few scattered book pages.

We are the universe, and the universe is us. Water and carbon are leitmotifs in this story and in these artworks. Water is the placental fluid, a universal solvent, so the fact that all plants and animals are largely made of salty water is a reminder of our origins. Carbon is the universal building block. Its delicate forms are etched on the glass. The specimen jar is an allusion to Miller and Urey’s famous “life-in-a-bottle” experiments [13], which re-created the first steps from simple molecules to amino acids. Within the jar, carbon is mixed with silica in a layer of mud, in an allusion to the periodic molecular structure of clay sheets acting as templates for the first replicator—the story of the Golem. The ash connotes combustion, the energy released in life and death. Carbon cycles in and out of the biosphere every million years or so and has done so thousands of times since life began. Crystals in the piece connote the capture of geological history in deli-cate forms. Some, like diamonds, are the result of enormous pressure. Others, like zircons, can be as old as the Earth itself. All speak to a cosmic history that forged their elements in the cores of stars [14]. With vivid imagining, we can see heaven in a grain of sand.

extreme lifeNext up in The Living Cosmos is a con-sideration of extremophile life forms. We imagine ourselves as Earth’s rugged generalists, but in truth, we are frail. We share the planet with microbes that would be at home in boiling water or deep rock or pure salt or battery acid. Their diverse forms are represented in spectral color. Life has radiated into ev-ery environmental niche [15]. Robust is biology’s middle name—it is our fragility that is unusual.

In the corresponding art piece, the core thread is DNA (Fig. 3). This delicate molecular ladder both codes and trans-mits information, and whatever experi-mentation might have taken place on the primeval Earth, organisms using DNA superseded and consumed all others. A base pair is like a letter, a gene is like a sentence, the genome is like an encyclo-pedia and all aspects of the organism are coded in genetic material and its com-plex interactions with the environment. The concept of life as information leads to the possibility of artificial life: life with-out carbon and water. Biologists are tin-kering with molecular Legos in the lab, trying to improve on nature and build

more microbial DNA contained in the very poorly understood microbes in a teaspoon of seawater than in the human genome [19]. These extremophile mi-crobes thrive in places where we cannot live: in pore spaces deep within a rock, bathed in acidic runoff from an aban-doned mine, rapidly repairing their radiation-damaged DNA in the shadow of a nuclear reactor. We can visualize tar-digrades, or water bears, no bigger than the head of a pin, albino fish foraging near an undersea volcano and sea worms projecting in undulating waves of pink from a sheet of methane ice on the ocean floor.

All this occurs on just one modest-sized planet: Earth. Life beyond Earth might not only be stranger than we imagine, it might be stranger than we can imag-ine. Rumpled bed sheets in Fig. 3 sug-

Fig. 3. Heather Green, Extreme Life, oil on panel, etched glass, steel, wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in, 2007. (© Heather Green)

438 Impey and Green, The Living Cosmos

destroy continents and ecosystems [22]. Dying stars can be seen in daylight; they are also like Vishnu, creators and destroyers of life, providing the heavy elements needed for biology, but irra-diating nearby life until its defenses are weakened.

Celestial ephemera speak to a con-tingency in evolution. Fitness is pyrrhic when nature rolls the dice and the strong die. On the other hand, life finds com-mon solutions to the problem of sur-vival on a fickle planet; eyes and wings and feathers have arisen multiple times in dispersed branches of the tree of life [23]. Organisms do not always become large and complex; the dominion of an-aerobic bacteria is without parallel, yet millions could fit on the dot at the end of this sentence. Below the glass, a scene in etched copper shows the burgeoning life in Earth’s Cambrian oceans, a remark-able change after 3 billion years of being invisibly small.

living in the solar systemThe only place we have scrutinized for life is our back yard: the solar system. The Living Cosmos considers nearby potential sites for biology. Straddling the Earth in space, our near neighbors subvert stereo-types of history and culture and feature strongly in the relevant art piece (Fig. 4). Mars has a geologically dead surface vis-ible through a thin veil of atmosphere. Its permafrost may hold traces of ancient life [24]. In stark contrast, Venus, named for the Goddess of Love, is a toxic night-mare of volcanoes, a bone-crushing, le-thal atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, with a surface temperature that would melt lead.

Mars of the imagination. Embedded in myth and legend, Mars is cast as the Jungian archetype of our darker side. When Percival Lowell saw the surface markings, he conjured up a dying race bringing polar water to the barren equa-torial region. Young Orson Welles caused a mini-exodus with a reality-style radio broadcast announcing that the Martians were arriving with ill intent. In comics and science fiction and our imaginations, Mars is a timeless, windswept place of lost dreams [25]. On the real Mars, two intrepid rovers little bigger than Tonka toys roam across the rugged terrain [26]. A small flotilla of spacecraft heads there to map the surface and test the soil for biology. The most muscular projection of humans off-Earth has us using technol-ogy to green the red planet, to create a bolthole in case we soil our world beyond

gest landscapes and the contours of the imagination and dreams. Our biology may be only one solution for life. It is a pleasant valley, but not the only dwelling place and not necessarily the best of all possible worlds. Biology elsewhere may be wildly or unrecognizably different.

shaping evolutionThe Living Cosmos turns next to the his-tory of life, seen through a glass darkly. The layers of the Earth hold traces of 500 million years of evolution, of hard body parts turned to stone and crystal as if by a magician’s spell [20]. A drill or shovel acts as a time machine, although a tumult of geological change and erosion inverts some strata and eradicates others. In every conceivable niche, the Earth is vibrantly, opulently alive.

The art piece Shaping Evolution (Color Plate B No. 1) uses thick layers of etched glass to convey the growth in complex-ity of life on Earth. The terrestrial stage forms from a swirling cloud of gas and dust. Tiny particles collide and stick; smoke becomes dust bunnies and rocky snowflakes. In a crescendo of accre-tion, molehills grow into mountains and then planets [21]. The primeval Earth was an antechamber to Hell, with wide-spread volcanism and oceans barely con-densed from steam. Comets and meteors slammed into the surface. They set the stage for biology by carrying water from the outer solar system and phosphorus to make the energy molecule ATP. They also bring mayhem; from time to time the Earth sweeps through a hail of death from comet debris, and the big impacts

Fig. 4. Heather Green, Living in the Solar System, oil on panel, steel, antique light bulbs, carved topo map, wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in, 2007.(© Heather Green)

Impey and Green, The Living Cosmos 439

out carbon. They will be satisfying a pri-mal human itch, as when our ancestors roamed from Siberia to Patagonia in a scant few thousand years.

are We alone?We contemplate a universe of which we are an indescribably small part (Fig. 6). Within our heads we hold the sci-entific basis for the creation and evo-lution of a universe that contains 10 thousand billion billion stars, and a statistical near-certainty of companion-ship. However, science itself is mute to meaning.

The Living Cosmos ends with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which as-sumes that the events on Earth that led to the development of large brains and technology are not unique. The physicist

As we venture out gingerly into space, it will be on multi-generational arks, with passengers willing to take a one-way trip to an unknown future. Our destiny in space is fueled by technology and the exponential rise in computation. Space probes are just extensions of ourselves, projections of our eyes and ears. We are exploring our backyard for now, but these robotic probes will some day travel on the fleet feet of anti-matter [30]. They will build replicas of themselves by min-ing asteroids and fanning out across the galaxy. It will almost be as if we are there, because they will be our creations, our children.

When the first human adventurers descend on a remote terrestrial planet, nobody knows what they will find: a shiny metallic sea (as in the art piece), a landscape of pure crystal or life with-

repair, or a new world for visionaries and explorers.

Venus of the imagination. It regards us balefully like a small milky eye, the bright-est object of the dusk and dawn sky, the crux of Mayan cosmology. In popular cul-ture it spawns lurid fantasies of fabulous space women—the pulp fiction would raise the pulse of any teenager. In the art piece the strata of cutout comic books represent the contours of the imagina-tion. In reality Venus is a bad dream from an inner circle of Hell. Three billion years ago Mars, Venus and the Earth may have been equally habitable, but now Venus stands as a warning of what happens if we let global warming run amok [27]. The old light bulbs in Fig. 4 are metaphors for growth and energy, containment and eventual death. From within, the heat of radioactivity powers a planet. A slender sheath of atmosphere protects us from the harshness of space debris and cosmic rays. Far from a star, habitable zones may be razor-thin. Perhaps our pale blue dot is the Goldilocks planet.

Distant WorldsThe dreamers got there first. In their mind’s eyes, the galaxy was littered with worlds, some living and some dead. Only gravity and crude technology kept us earthbound. Astronomers have finally caught up with the vision. The Living Cosmos describes the success of their quixotic quest after decades of failed attempts. Since 1995, they have discov-ered over 350 planets beyond the solar system [28].

Earth is a spaceship, as Fig. 5 conveys. Even while standing still, we trace a cork-screw motion through space as we spin and orbit the Sun. On an even more gi-gantic scale, we conduct a circuit of the Milky Way every quarter-billion years, dipping in and out of the star fields and nebulae of the disk. The first astronauts to orbit the Earth experienced the shock of the new: a small watery planet set against a void. Distant twins of Earth pass unnoticed like fireflies next to the flood-lights of their parent stars. Astronomers found exoplanets by stealth, detecting the periodic stretching and squashing of the light waves from the star as the planet tugs it around like an unruly dog on a leash. We have found clones of Jupiter and clones of Neptune and Uranus, and a harvest of clones of Earth is only a de-cade away [29].

Earth is an ark. We know enough about the harshness of space to suspect that the bounty of our biosphere may be special.

Fig. 5. Heather Green, Distant Worlds, oil on panel, etched glass, computer motherboard, steel, wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in,2007. (© Heather Green)

440 Impey and Green, The Living Cosmos

we touch the water and we look to the sky. Rooted in our water world, we are made of water and think it is the best basis for biology. Water is one of the most abundant molecules in the uni-verse, and watery planets are expected to be common in remote solar systems. We touch the sky and look at the water. Below its surface, cephalopods and ceta-ceans provide nearby examples of alien intelligences decoupled from technology [33]; however rich their inner lives, they will not point telescopes at the sky and puzzle about their place in the universe. Our anthropocentric tendencies mean that we may not be able to recognize an alien intelligence, or the distinction between natural objects and artifacts. Their powers may be godlike and may include the ability to simulate creatures like us.

Enrico Fermi once asked the pointed question, “Where are they?” With one hundred million habitable worlds in our galaxy, it seemed implausible that alien life forms should not have matched and eclipsed our capabilities [31]. With up to a 5-billion-year head start, they could be to us as we are to the microbes on this planet. We are lonely and search for com-panionship with messages tossed into the ocean of night. We also communicate in-advertently with a bubble of radio and TV transmissions that has by now enveloped planets around a thousand stars [32]. Understanding might be elusive in dia-log with aliens of unknown function and form. When we look into the eyes of an ape, it is sobering to know that we cannot even communicate with a creature that shares 99% of our DNA.

Windows are also mirrors. In Fig. 6,

We are divided against ourselves: a young race full of poise and promise, but also tainted by aggression. We want to know the alien, but through windows on the universe perhaps we are looking for and seeing ourselves.

MaTerials and MeTaPhorsThe materials in the art pieces are uni-versal. The sinuous molecules that bind pigments in oil paint are like those that beaded up in Earth’s primeval oceans to form the first cell. Glass is a translucent form of sand and is representative of the mineral content of the Earth’s mantle and Earth-like planets elsewhere. Metal is a relic of supernovae, the fiery stel-lar cataclysms that also enable biology by forging and ejecting life’s elements. Wood panels and paper are among the means by which formerly living things are brought into our service, making art an indirect homage to carbon and biology.

The themes in the artworks are univer-sal. Living organisms are poised near the logarithmic center of a range of scales from the nucleus of an atom to the gran-deur of a spiral galaxy. We still struggle to understand the universe of which we are a microscopic part, amazed that comprehension is possible at all. We are surrounded by horizons and boundar-ies, yet some are as illusory as the limits we place on our imaginations. Protean forms of nature—from stars and plan-ets, to crystals, fossils and the double helix of DNA—are the grist of scien-tific explanation and of dreams. They exist in the physical world and also as metaphors.

It comes down to trust. The artist trusts that his or her vision and craft can be rooted in a particular sensibility and ex-perience yet articulate a vision that reso-nates broadly and tells a universal truth. As Hermann Hesse wrote, “The highest art sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of being misun-derstood” [34]. The scientist trusts that the limited compass of perception will not prevent the discovery of a guiding principle of nature. Science and art are both quintessentially optimistic human activities. Trust also defines the space be-tween the artist and the scientist. Coming from separate traditions, they can find middle ground between the palette and the spectrum, between life as we know it and life as we imagine it and between the evanescent mutability of artistic in-vention and the obdurate exactness of data.

Fig. 6. Heather Green, Are We Alone? oil on panel, etched glass, wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in, 2007. (© Heather Green)

Impey and Green, The Living Cosmos 441

26. S. Squyres, Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (New York: Hyperion, 2005).

27. D. Grinspoon, Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of our Mysterious Twin Planet (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

28. F. Casoli and T. Encrenaz, The New Worlds: Extra-solar Planets (New York: Springer, 2007).

29. J. Lissauer, “How Common Are Habitable Plan-ets?” Nature, 402, pp. C11–C14 (1999).

30. P. Gilster, Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration (Berlin: Springer, 2004).

31. S. Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens. . . Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi’s Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Springer, 2002).

32. S. Shostak, Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scien-tist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009).

33. J. Catalani, “Cephalopod Intelligence,” American Paleontologist, 19, No. 3, pp. 35–39 (2008).

34. H. Hesse, Reflections (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1974).

35. R. Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

Resources

<www.randomhouse .com/cata log/disp lay.pperl/9781400065066.html>

<www.thelivingcosmos.com>

<www.library.arizona.edu/events/cosmos/>

<www.youtube.com/watch?v=7etzYTwpoXo>

<www.astrobio.net/news/>

<www.cartagrafia.com>

Manuscript received 22 April 2009.

Chris Impey is University Distinguished Pro-fessor at the University of Arizona and Deputy Head of the Department of Astronomy. He studies quasars and distant galaxies and has written 170 research papers and two as-tronomy textbooks. He has won 11 teaching awards at the University of Arizona and was named a Distinguished Teaching Scholar by the NSF and Arizona Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. The Living Cos-mos was his first popular book; his second, titled How It Ends, was published in 2010 by Norton.

Heather Green’s projects and installations em-ploy an extensive range of media including traditional oil painting, letterpress, sculpture, photography and the Internet. Her practice examines the nuances of place, memory and natural phenomenon and is concerned with ecological awareness and preservation. The collaborative nature of many of her projects and commissions has led her to work with a diverse range of individuals including poets, scientists and fishermen.

3. Susan Pierce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) pp. 109–121.

4. K. Hoving, Joseph Cornell and Astronomy: A Case for the Star (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). The final work had its debut in fall 2007 in the lobby of the University of Arizona Science Library, in spring of 2008 it was displayed at the University of Arizona’s Flandrau Science Center, and in the sum-mer of 2008 it moved to the Bio5 Institute’s Thomas W. Keating Research building, where it has been in-cluded in the permanent collection.

5. T. Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Morrow, 1988).

6. M.J. Benton and D.A.T. Harper, Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

7. N. Pace, “The Universal Nature of Biochemistry,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98, No. 8, pp. 805–808 (2001).

8. A. Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams (New York: Random House, 1993).

9. C.H. Lineweaver and T.M. Davis, “Misconceptions about the Big Bang,” Scientific American, March, pp. 36–45 (2005).

10. R. Hazen, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Ori-gins (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2005).

11. P. Plait, Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End (New York, Penguin: 2008).

12. C. Woese, “Interpreting the Universal Phyloge-netic Tree,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-ences, 97, No. 15, pp. 8392–8396 (2000).

13. S. Miller, H. Urey and J. Oro, “Origin of Organic Compounds on the Primitive Earth and in Meteor-ites.” Journal of Molecular Evolution, 9, No. 1, pp. 59–72 (1976).

14. S. Wilde, J. Valley, W. Peck and C. Graham, “Evi-dence from Detrital Zircons for the Existence of Con-tinental Crust and Oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr Ago.” Nature 409, pp. 175–178 (2001).

15. T. Satyanarayana, et al., “Extremophile Microbes: Diversity and Perspectives,” Current Science 89, No. 1, pp. 78–90, (2005).

16. Lightman [8].

17. R. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Viking Adult, 2005).

18. Hazen [10].

19. M. Sogin, et al. “Microbial Diversity in the Deep Sea and the Unexplored Biosphere,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, No. 32, pp. 12115-12120 (2006).

20. A. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Life on Earth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

21. V. Safronov, Evolution of the Protoplanetary Cloud and Formation of the Earth and Planets. Israel Program for Scientific Translations, Keter Publishing House, 1972.

22. Lineweaver and Davis [9].

23. S. Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Hu-mans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

24. A. Chaikin, A Passion for Mars: Intrepid Explorers of the Red Planet (New York: Abrams, 2008).

25. O. Morton, Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World (London: Picador, 2002).

asTrobiology: The scienTisT’s PersPecTive (chris iMPey)In a universe ripe for biology, it is natural to speculate on the existence and nature of biology elsewhere. I was drawn to this collaboration by the insight and sensitiv-ity the artist brought to imagining life in the universe. Induction can only go so far in imagining how strange life might be on distant worlds. Astrobiology creates a deep resonance with a fundamental as-pect of the human condition: the loneli-ness we might feel if we learned we were adrift in a vast and lifeless universe.

asTrobiology: The arTisT’s PersPecTive (heaTher green)The recurring motif of the horizon dis-secting a cluster of stars above from the bioluminescence in a night sea below, prevalent in the artwork, creates a per-fect allegory for the ideas Chris Impey examines in The Living Cosmos. The ex-panse beyond Earth contrasts with and yet mirrors the abundant and exquisite forms of the microscopic world; time and space swell or contract depending on our perceptions of celestial, terrestrial, mac-rocosmic or microcosmic phenomena; and the ontological questions we pose in the search for life beyond Earth are inherently anthropocentric.

In her book Storming the Gates of Para-dise, Rebecca Solnit describes how con-stellations are an essential metaphorical construct [35]. They serve as a theater for story-telling and have also played the roles of compass, clock and calendar for centuries. The materials and metaphors this project uses draw from a rich history of astronomy, philosophy and mythol-ogy as well as from current scientific re-search—connecting all the dots to create a new reading of the sky.

References and Notes

Unedited references as provided by the authors.

1. C.D. Impey, The Living Cosmos (New York: Random House, 2007).

2. The general flow of the chapters and the artwork is “inside-out.” The seven topics are: the method of science and the birth of astrobiology, the origin and history of life on Earth, the limits of biology and ar-tificial life, the evolution of life, the prospect of life in the solar system, the discovery and properties of planets beyond the solar system, and the Drake equa-tion and the search for intelligent life in the universe.