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28 A New Era NASA has asked the National Academy of Sciences to look at possible alternative chemistries for life. Some researchers hope to create living things based on such different chemical processes.'* There may be mecha- nisms for life that we have not yet imagined. Cosmology and biology are not separate disciplines, since life cannot be understood without tracing the origin and evolution of the universe; nor can the universe be comprehended without considering the life residing wetale within it. We have accumulated many supporting arguments for a biological uni- verse—a concept that has been widely accepted despite the lack of evi- dence. What had been a borderland field is increasingly accepted as a science—a very interdisciplinary one, resting on many areas of research.’ Astronomer and science writer David Darling suggested that biological science may now be at a stage analogous to physics when Newton discov- ered the law of gravity, more than 200 years ago. We already can make out, amid the tumult of claims and counterclaims, the beginnings of a general theory of biology. In its attempt to understand how life springs from the evolution of the universe, astrobiology aims for a grand unification, bring- ing biology together with cosmology."° Like other new sciences, this one remains open to innovative thinking. Nobel Prize winner Baruch Blumberg, the first head of NASA’s Astro- biology Institute, thought that this new field would have the advantage of being “unencumbered by hypothesis.” We should let our quest for life be guided by our theories, said McKay, but we should try not to be constrained by them. They may be wrong.”” We still do not know what is contingent and what is necessary in the evolution of life, what are the “universals,” and what are the “parochials.” Dick found that only two conclusions are warranted by the evidence at this stage. First, if life exists beyond the Earth, it will be astonishingly diverse. Second, the abundance of extraterrestrial life will be inversely propor- tional to its complexity; microbial life will be more abundant and intelligent life less so.'® So far, the search for extraterrestrial life has been frustrating. However, this is a long-term effort. Physicist Gerald Feinberg and chemist Robert Shapiro compared the search to the European exploration of the Western Hemisphere that began in the fifteenth century and took hundreds of years to complete. The human will to carry out projects over long periods of time cannot be dismissed lightly.’ A Metadiscipline —Astronomer George Seielstad, 1989"