of which are argued to exist, on probabilistic grounds? Are they simply
too far away, the distances too vast for even electromagnetic signals?
And too far for interstellar travel—assuming no Star Trek-style warp
drive or navigable space-time wormholes. Or, are technologically
advanced civilizations the rare exception, rather than the rule? Per-
haps life itself is a profoundly rare occurrence. Or, is something else,
unimaginably stranger, going on? It’s another one of those mysteries.
Our scientific framework for describing reality has its origin in
astronomy. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) seeded the idea, Galileo
Galilei (1564-1642) staked out the territory, and Isaac Newton (1643-
1727) locked it in with an elegant mathematical description of both
celestial and terrestrial motion. Throughout the 1700s and 1800s the
mathematical foundations put in place by Newton were extended to
apply to a wide variety of natural phenomena—light, electricity, mag-
netism, gaseous pressure, temperature, and other thermodynamic
properties among them. This description of the so-called physical
properties of the world is called classical physics. This historical tra-
jectory, beginning with Copernicus and extending into the twentieth
century, was one of revolutionary reconceptualization of nature.
Darwin made his revolutionary contributions to biology within
this framework of physical science. Ever since Darwin, discoveries in
biology have continued to fit in and further support this view of na-
ture. Thus, we have a system of scientific explanation that posits that
all of what we call reality is constructed in some way from material
stuff—matter and its interactions—as described by the mathematical
laws of physics. Everything else follows from that.
This is the framework within which our science is currently con-
ducted, the so-called metaphysical framework. Metaphysics describes
the larger context within which we interpret scientific analyses, the