Jaime Green - Five Way Interview

Jaime Green is a science writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, and she is series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia, and her writing has appeared in Slate, Popular Science, The New York Times Book Review, American Theatre, Catapult, Astrobites, and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and son. Her new book is The Possibility of Life.

Why science?

On the one hand, a love for it was instilled in me from a young age, by my dad who loves space, and by my maternal grandfather, an engineer who loved gardening. But it really stuck with me. I think it's the mix of mystery and wonder, the amazing invisible things that are all around us—cells and atoms and fossils—and the sense of interconnectedness that comes from scientific understanding.

Why this book?

Astronomy has always been my favorite science, and when I read Carl Sagan in my teens, both Contact and Cosmos, he had a huge impact on me, that romantic but scientifically serious approach. But for a long time, I thought there wasn't room for my version of this book. There are so many books about the scientific search for alien life, and they're all written by professors of astronomy and astrophysics! But when I started writing about the science and sci-fi together, it all opened up, and I realized that looking at this as a question of imagination was so fascinating to me, and so exciting to write about. It doesn't diminish the science but recognizes that it's about more than finding answers, but looking for meaning, too.

Why do you think the idea of alien life we will probably never encounter excites people?

Well first of all, imagining the possibilities is a fascinating endeavour—they don't have to be real to be powerful. But whether or not there's life on other worlds, and what that life is like, has a huge impact on how we understand our place in the cosmos. Just knowing that they're out there would change so much.

What’s next?

I'm still figuring that out. I feel like I've said everything I ever wanted to say about astronomy and aliens, but writing this book led me to new interests in chemistry and biology, a topic that was pretty new to me in my writing. So I'm excited to see what new directions that might lead in.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Resting? Publishing a book is far more overwhelming than I could have imagined. It was a life-long dream, and now the book is in the world, it's almost too much to process. But I'm excited for spring, for some long walks in nature, for seeing what comes up in my garden despite my neglect.

Image by Sylvie Rosokoff

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here

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