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The opera of Stanislaw Lem present us with a kaleidoscope of ideas and concepts all linked, in one way or another, to one key issue: the place of evolving minds in the evolving universe. In particular, the idea of fragmented, non-conscious intelligences belonging to neither strictly natural, nor strictly artificial, realms has been presented throughout his writing career; we shall analyse how these ideas are implemented in an early (The Invincible), as well as a late (Peace on Earth) novel, which superficially have very little in common. A case will be made that this idea can fruitfully connect with several recent developments in astrobiology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of mind. As in so many other things, Lem has been decades ahead of his time, as contemporary pop-cultural elaborations clearly demonstrate.

An often used assumption in astrobiology and SETI studies is that the average condition of the present universe is typical in time, and that many of the relevant physical quantities can be treated as stationary. The uncritical adoption of such assumption of ‘temporal Copernicanism’ can lead to wrong conclusions, and should be treated with extreme care, if not discarded altogether.

Both human bioenhancement and human activities in space are two great projects of our species for this millennium. Both are often motivated by exalted and noble purposes, the most important being the avoidance of the “ultimate harm” or a similar extremely undesirable outcome. Both projects are often met with fierce and even fanatical opposition. Motivations for opposition are heterogeneous—at least when surveyed superficially. This chapter puts forward the hypothesis that the ultimate source of this often-hysterical opposition is anthropocentrism: the tendency to separate humans, as they are today, from their natural and evolutionary embedding and assign high essential value to their current make-up. There is a strong anthropocentric cartel with vested interest in human exceptionalism, geocentrism, and other forms of parochial, self-indulgent, small-scale, and solipsist thinking. The cartel is the main source of resistance and opposition to both human bioenhancement and colonization of the universe. The anthropocentric stance against colonization of the universe is incoherent and implies magical, rather than scientific, way of thinking. The argument for delayed human exploration and colonization of the universe is, like any other delay-type argument, just a cop-out for avoiding responsibility which resolves nothing of substance.

The alleged improbability of particular critical steps has for quite a long time been one of the favoured arguments of the opponents of universal, cosmic evolution. In a nutshell, the argument goes like this: various realms in which we perceive evolutionary processes are separate domains (implicitly endowed with separate conceptual ‘essences’), since the transition, probabilities between these domains are astronomically small numbers, of the order of 10−100 or smaller. For instance, we should discuss chemical and biological evolution separately, since the probability of spontaneous transition between these two domains – the origin of life or abiogenesis – is extremely small; we are dealing with, in Monod’s famous words, ‘a lucky accident’. Analogous arguments are made for transition between simple microscopic life and complex metazoans, or for transition between conventional animals and intelligent beings with language and culture. These arguments are often behind either creationist or ‘rare-Earth’ argument for uniqueness of our astronomical habitat, as well as behind the scepticism towards astrobiology and SETI studies. The probabilities cited are usually inductive inferences from the prima facie requirements deemed historically necessary in the unique terrestrial case. In the last couple of decades, however, we have obtained much better insight into the dynamical processes underlying some of these requirements – and original ideas emerged as to how we could bypass at least some of them. In that light, it is interesting to consider whether this sea change influenced the sceptical discourse; as I will show, there are reasons to conclude that this kind of scepticism is motivated by extrascientific concerns.