Janna Levin: preference

Transcript context

…Exactly. So why haven’t we seen them? Right? Well, because that’s a pretty big bar. So if you look at, just to say for comparison, dinosaurs; 250 million years. I mean maybe not very bright. Didn’t invent fire. Didn’t write sonnets. They didn’t contemplate the origin of the universe, but they lived. And in a benign situation without confronting their own demise, at their own hands; paws, hooves. So it’s just a sheer numbers game. That’s a long time, 250 million years. I do think though that life can flourish without wanting to manipulate its environment and that we do see many examples of species on earth that are very long-lived, very, very long-lived, and have very different states of consciousness. They have, the jellyfish does not even have a localized brain. I don’t think they have a heart or blood. I mean they’re really different from us. And that’s what I think we have to start thinking about when we think about aliens. Those species have lived for a very, very long time. They even show some evidence of immortality. You can wound one badly, and there are certain jellyfish that will go back into a kind of pre-state and start over. So I think we’re very attached to imagining creatures like us, that manipulate technology, and I think we have to be way more imaginative if we’re going to really take seriously life in the universe. They might not prioritize conquest and expansion. They might not be violent.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.