*** SAMPLE *** Before the first star, before hydrogen decided to transcend, there was an immeasurable instant. It was not light. It was not energy. It was something simpler and more unsettling: a question. And the universe, still dark and formless, awoke to try to answer it.

I have devoted more than sixty years—perhaps unknowingly from the very first day—to pursuing a single intuition: that life is not an accident, but a style of the universe. I was an astronomer before I became a visual artist, curious before I was academic, a witness before I was a narrator.

For decades, I observed scientific disciplines with the same devotion a monk applies to liturgy: astrophysics, biology, thermodynamics, quantum cosmology, philosophy of mind, and complex systems theory. Not in search of accumulation, but from a deep suspicion that all these languages were trying to articulate the same underlying truth.

This book is not an answer. It is a warning: the question is still alive. And if it remains alive, so do we.

Life, I have come to believe, is not merely biology or chemistry. It is a physical behavior of matter in the face of forgetting: a thermodynamic resistance endowed with memory. Civilizations, like organisms, emerge and disappear under cosmic pressures that dwarf human time.

This essay is written from humility. From the recognition that we are fragile yet inevitable—brief sparks of meaning ignited in an ancient night. If the reader feels vertigo, that is appropriate. Vertigo is the correct response to scale...

*** SAMPLE *** There is a spark that precedes intelligence but does not guarantee it: the capacity to question. Not to react. Not to adapt. Not to survive. To question.

The universe is full of life, but almost empty of questions. Simple life is common, repeating itself like a basic chord across cosmic scales. Complex life is rarer. Conscious life rarer still. And questioning consciousness—life that wonders why it exists—is an almost negligible fraction of existence.

From Boltzmann to modern prebiotic chemistry, everything indicates that complexity arises when energy flows through systems capable of retaining information. If the universe experiences enough sunrises, biology will dawn. Curiosity, however, requires an extraordinary convergence of conditions.

This asymmetry explains the silence of the sky. Not because intelligence does not exist, but because temporal coincidence is almost impossible. Civilizations may share space without ever sharing time—like two trains on the same track, centuries apart.

The Fermi paradox dissolves once we abandon anthropocentric expectations. Intelligence is not necessarily expansive, noisy, or permanent. It can be ephemeral, inward, and silent. The absence of signals is not evidence of absence, but of a universe indifferent to simultaneity...