A Permanent Base On Mars Would Have

It Will Be In The Convergence Of Evolutionary Biology, Developmental Biology And Cancer Biology That The Answer To Cancer Will Lie. Nor Will This Confluence Be A One-way Street.

Science, We Are Repeatedly Told, Is The Most Reliable Form Of Knowledge About The World Because It Is Based On Testable Hypotheses. Religion, By Contrast, Is Based On Faith. The Term 'doubting Thomas' Well Illustrates The Difference.

It Is Possible That A Scientific Discovery Will Be Made That Humans Will Later Regret Because It Has Awful Consequences. The Problem Is, We Probably Would Not Know In Advance And, Once The Discovery Is Made, It Cannot Be Undiscovered.

What We Want Is Another Sample Of Life, Which Is Not On Our Tree Of Life At All. All Life That We've Studied So Far On Earth Belongs To The Same Tree. We Share Genes With Mushrooms And Oak Trees And Fish And Bacteria That Live In Volcanic Vents And So On That It's All The Same Life Descended From A Common Origin. What We Want Is A Second Tree Of Life. We Want Alien Life, Alien Not Necessarily In The Sense Of Having Come From Space, But Alien In The Sense Of Belonging To A Different Tree Altogether. That Is What We're Looking For, "life 2.0."

It Is Hard To Resist The Impression That The Present Structure Of The Universe, Apparently So Sensitive To Minor Alterations In Numbers, Has Been Rather Carefully Thought Out...the Seemingly Miraculous Concurrence Of These Numerical Values Must Remain The Most Compelling Evidence For Cosmic Design.