Ron Miller

An illustration of Freeman Dyson’s vision of “Noah’s Ark culture”—a space operation in which, “sometime in the next few hundred years, biotechnology will have advanced to the point where we can design and breed entire ecologies of living creatures adapted to survive in remote places away from Earth.”

The Green Universe: A Vision

Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Science, looks at recent books on space travel and visions of life beyond Earth in a review for the New York Review of Books:

Almost all the current discussion of life in the universe assumes that life can exist only on worlds like our Earth, with air and water and strong gravity. This means that life is confined to planets and their moons. The sun and the planets and moons contain most of the mass of our solar system. But for life, surface area is more important than mass. The room available for life is measured by surface area and not by mass. In our solar system and in the universe, the available area is mostly on small objects, on comets and asteroids and dust grains, not on planets and moons.

Read the full review at the New York Review of Books.