Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and artist Sophia Al-Maria explore life on other worlds. Departing from Walker’s radical rethinking of the origins and definitions of life in her 2024 book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence, and Al-Maria’s visionary contributions to feminist science fiction, the two delve into physics and art through the lens of speculative futurism to consider what forms of life lie on and beyond our planet and understanding.
Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist whose research focuses on new approaches to the origins of life, artificial life, and the detection of life on other worlds. She is the author of Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (Riverhead, 2024), which argues for a radical new thinking around what constitutes life. Walker is Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University (ASU) and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She leads one of the largest theory groups in origins of life and astrobiology. Her team has made major contributions to astrobiology through co-development of assembly theory, advancing detection of alien life and efforts to make life de novo in the lab. Walker was awarded the Stanley Miller Early Career Award by the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life in 2021 and a Science Polymath Fellowship from Schmidt Futures in 2023. In addition to her work in astrobiology, Walker has collaborated on several interdisciplinary projects with artists and philosophers, combining scientific rigor with speculative thinking to explore questions about the nature of life in the universe.
Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist and writer whose work across video art and screenwriting envisions revisionist histories and multipolar narratives of life on earth. In a multidisciplinary art practice that expands into collage, performance, and installation, the foundation of Al-Maria’s work lies in questioning the intersections between those in power and those who are “othered.” She is particularly known for the concept of “Gulf Futurism,” a term she coined to describe the force behind rapid fossil-fuelled development in the late 20th and early 21st century Gulf, where oil extraction brought unprecedented urban development and issues of inequality and environmental devastation. Her 2012 memoir and 2016 film The Girl Who Fell to Earth reflects her personal experiences of alienation growing up between the Pacific Northwest, Qatar and Egypt. Her more recent collection of writings Sad Sack (Book Works, 2019) and Sad Sack II (Book Works, 2024), uses her own journey as a writer to investigate the various ways in which the future is unevenly distributed or misunderstood. In 2024, Al-Maria collaborated with artist Lydia Ourahmane on Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol—an exhibition that examined the myths of England as a nation and the precarities of being an immigrant in the country. Al-Maria’s works have also been recently exhibited at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); GARAGE, Moscow (2021); Julia Stoschek, Dusseldorf (2020); and Tate Britain, London (2019).