As soon as worlds beyond our own were imagined, they were imagined teeming with life. Life was taken for granted. Intelligent life, usually. What would the point have been of imagining worlds that were all inert stone or insensate fire or sterile water? In her book on the search for life beyond Earth, Sarah Johnson reflects on the failure to find it:
With a mechanical, largely lifeless universe came a newfound existential sorrow. It meant we were potentially alone in the enormity of the now tenebrous night.
word: tenebrous
definition (dictionary.com): dark; gloomy; obscure.
Dark, gloomy, obscure? Hm. Sounds like the definition of night itself, more or less. Which does kind of make “tenebrous” redundant … A tenebrous night would be a night darker, gloomier, and more obscure than it was already then, right? Well. It can always get darker, can’t it? The night, it can always get darker.
source:
The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world
by Sarah Stewart Johnson
2020. Crown, New York
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