Ideas and Implications


BIOCOSM places the story of our origin and destiny in a cosmic context.

What is humankind’s place in the universe? That fundamental question underlies both scientific inquiry and millennia of religious thought. The traditional answer of science is that life and human intelligence are of no cosmic consequence but merely the random outcome of the interplay of natural forces. Mainstream religions answer the same question in many different ways but most share the view that the mind of the Creator of the universe is ultimately inaccessible to mortal minds. BIOCOSM challenges both viewpoints and suggests that the emergence of life and mind is a cosmic imperative encoded in the basic laws of nature and, further, that highly evolved intelligence will eventually play the key role in reproducing the cosmos.

BIOCOSM provides the framework for a new style of final theory.

BIOCOSM suggests that in attempting to explain the linkage between life, intelligence, and the bio-friendly qualities of the cosmos, most mainstream scientists have, in essence, been peering through the wrong end of the telescope. The book asserts that life and intelligence are, in fact, the primary cosmological phenomena and that everything else—the constants of inanimate nature, the dimensionality of the universe, the origin of carbon and other elements in the hearts of giant supernovas, the pathway traced by biological evolution—is secondary and derivative. In the words of British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, BIOCOSM embraces the proposition that “what we call the fundamental constants—the numbers that matter to physicists—may be secondary consequences of the final theory, rather than direct manifestations of its deepest and most fundamental level.” Rees’s insight yields a glimpse of a new kind of final theory that views the oddly bio-friendly qualities of our anthropic universe—a universe adapted to the peculiar needs of carbon-based living creatures just as thoroughly as those creatures are adapted to the physical exigencies of the universe—not as an irksome curiosity but rather as a vital set of clues pointing toward a radically new vision of the basic nature of the cosmos. BIOCOSM attempts to follow those clues to their logical conclusion.


BIOCOSM provides the foundation for a new set of ethical imperatives and insights.

Science should not divorce itself from the ethical, legal, and social implications of new theories. BIOCOSM identifies three key ethical imperatives and insights that derive from the new cosmological theory articulated in the book:

• First, that humankind is ethically obliged to safeguard the welfare of future generations.

• Second, that a spirit of species-neutral altruism should inform our interactions with other living creatures and with the environment we share.

• Third, that we and other living creatures throughout the cosmos are part of a vast, still undiscovered transterrestrial community of lives and intelligences spread across billions of galaxies and countless parsecs who are collectively engaged in a portentous mission of truly cosmic importance. Under the BIOCOSM vision, we share a common fate with that community—to help shape the future of the universe and transform it from a collection of lifeless atoms into a vast, transcendent mind.

• The inescapable implication of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the immense saga of biological evolution on Earth is one tiny chapter in an ageless tale of the struggle of the creative force of life against the disintegrative acid of entropy, of emergent order against encroaching chaos, and ultimately of the heroic power of mind against the brute intransigence of lifeless matter. Through the quality and character of our contribution to the progress of life and intelligence in this epic struggle, we shape not only our own lives and those of our immediate progeny but the lives and minds of every generation of living creatures down to the end of time. We thereby help to shape the ultimate fate of the cosmos itself.