Alien Intelligence—and Ours

During the summer of 2003 I was a crewman aboard the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Atlantis—the mothership for the deep-sea research submersible Alvin. Among the many fine sailors, scientists, subpilots, and educators I was privileged to meet on this voyage was the now-deceased paleontologist Dolf Seilacher, a learned man from a bygone European culture. Urbane and engaging, Dolf was more or less a skeptic, albeit the kind of skeptic who was interested in serious questions. He was also an artist, like the naturalists of yore.