EXCERPT Why are the skies so silent? Just where is everyone? Where are the feats of astroengineering, the Dyson spheres, the spacefaring exo-civilizations? This is the astrobiological ‘Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?’ (‘Where are those who were before us?’). Do we ‘groaneth and travaileth’ alone in creation? Such were the ultimate outward-looking questions that led Barker to begin charting the most intimately inward, and to turn from astronomical signaletics to the spine. A persistent theme throughout our secret history of Spinal Catastrophism has been the dubious relation—and even telic antagonism—between the cerebro-spinal and vegetative-autonomic factions of the complexified organism, CNS and ANS, the former embedded within the latter. Such evolutionary nesting of separate functional systems—or adaptive complexification via endosymbiosis—has recently been argued to be a plausible ‘astrobiological universal’ for the evolution of life forms across all exo-biospheres…