Caleb Scharf

An astrobiologist on what we'll need these machines for — starting with whether we're alone.

Cosmic, expansive, Carl Sagan Medal storyteller. Big-canvas optimism.

Caleb Scharf is an astrobiologist and one of the most widely read science writers working today. In The Ascent of Information he coined the term "dataome" — the enormous body of information humans have externalized into cave paintings, books, servers and machines. His argument is that this is not a pile of stuff we own. It behaves like a living system that we feed and that feeds us, and it has been growing since the first story told out loud.

His new book, The Giant Leap, argues that exploration is a biological imperative rather than a choice. Life pushes into places it does not understand, because that is what life does.

He'll be making the case against the instinct to understand AI before proceeding with it. Exploration is how maps get made, not what you do once you already have a map. Every organism that ever adapted, every crossing of an ocean, every science that ever opened a field went into territory it could not yet describe, and the understanding arrived along the way. And he works on the largest open question there is — whether anything else out there is alive — which now depends on reading more of the universe than humans can read unaided.

You'll take away more humility, and the ambition that comes with it. We are inside something we did not design and cannot see the edges of, and we are now inventing a technology we will change alongside. Answering Scharf's question means using these machines for something worth using them for — which puts most of what we argue about them in proportion.

ONE READ — "The Selfish Dataome," Nautilus. The essay that started the idea, and still the fastest way in.