Sara Imari Walker

physically or mentally.

In a 2016 paper titled The Hard Problem of Life, physicists Sarah Imari Walker and Paul Davies observe that both astrobiology and our assumptions about non-human consciousness tend to be biased by our own understanding of terrestrial life.

We take for granted that the particular forms that evolved on Earth from the level of cells to multicellular organisms to eusocial and linguistic societies, are the inevitable product of natural laws, so that something like them must emerge anywhere life exists.

But Walker and Davies argue that, in fact, life as we know it is the product of a combination of chance and necessity, including many unlikely events that push the evolution of life on to new pathways.