Introduction

Metaphysics is extraterrestrial in at least at two important senses. The first concerns the nature of metaphysics as an inquiry into the most general principles of reality, that is, those abiding and indefatigable features that necessarily obtain in any and all possible worlds, no matter what galactic neighborhood they inhabit. While our terrestrial philosophical traditions have argued for millennia as to what these final notions are, that they are remains a longstanding presupposition. The second sense is related to this and concerns the terrestrial practice of metaphysics by our admittedly unique species on a small planet located on the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy. After all, should there be even one living perspective elsewhere in the cosmos (and there are likely many), then we are extraterrestrials doing extraterrestrial metaphysics. The following discussion aims to be a particular expression of extraterrestrial metaphysics in these two senses.

My philosophical launching point will be the robust, albeit neglected, tradition of process metaphysics, which has largely been ignored in recent philosophical and theological discourse concerning other worlds and extraterrestrial life. As I aim to demonstrate, this neglect is unfortunate and unwarranted. Process philosophy and theology are robust traditions of cosmic reflection that have always been implicitly open to all manner of extraterrestrial life and intelligence. What is more, process philosophers and theologians have not been silent on the topic. Explicit statements even extend from Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), and Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), who are widely recognized as the founding pioneers of the modern process tradition. Only recently is this coming to light, however.¹

As an exercise in extraterrestrial metaphysics, this discussion proceeds with the conviction that process metaphysics has much to offer contemporary philosophical and theological considerations and/or justifications of wide-ranging life in the universe. In dialogue with Whitehead, Teilhard, Hartshorne, and a variety of others, I elaborate process metaphysics as a fruitful species of extraterrestrial metaphysics grounded first and foremost in human experience as an anthropocosmic fact of nature. I argue that Life, Mind, and Value are among the ultimate principles and/or categories belonging to the universe and that they always find embodiment within a fluid anthropocosmic ontology conceived as living, mind-full, and value-full. I also articulate some of the relevant contours of a process cosmotheology as it relates to process extraterrestrial metaphysics, including some of the metaphysical riddles it addresses and the extraterrestrial plentitude it justifies via divine benevolence. I conclude by extending an invitation to all terrestrial metaphysicians to become more deliberately extraterrestrial in both theory and practice.

Humanity as Anthropocosmic Fact of Nature

I begin with a fundamental conviction concerning the starting point of any extraterrestrial metaphysics. This conviction can be put in the following way: human existence and experience is an exemplification rather than an exception to the nature and character of the universe and what it is ultimately doing. Despite the reality of our Copernican cosmological de-centering, our metaphysical re-centering is required if we are to have any place to begin thinking about the fundamental principles that are operative in the cosmos and its evolution.

It belongs to the heart of process extraterrestrial metaphysics to actively counter what Whitehead calls the “abstraction” (Whitehead 1967a) or “bifurcation” (Whitehead 1964a) of human experience from nature as the modus operandi of mechanistic materialism with its affirmation of vacuous (dead) matter as the “senseless, valueless, purposeless” substratum of the cosmos itself (Whitehead 1967a, 17). Despite heroic attempts, such a metaphysical description is wholly incapable of rationalizing not only our evolution in this universe but also why our evolution (and that of any life whatsoever) should be ontologically possible at all. To invert these philosophical vices, however, is to reaffirm our complete weddedness to cosmic evolution in the form of revelation. What I mean is that our experience is a fact within nature and therefore revelatory as to the metaphysical depths that find multitudes of cosmological expression beyond us: “[F]rom nebulae to stars, from stars to planets, from inorganic matter to life, from life to reason and moral responsibility” (Whitehead 1964b, 212). Despite vast ranges involved in this spectrum of cosmological achievement, there is, for process extraterrestrial metaphysics, a deeper metaphysical continuity that ties all together. As Hartshorne (1962, 183–84) summarizes: “[It] would be silly to refuse to take advantage of the fact that in ourselves we have the one individual piece of nature which we know in its individuality from two sides: externally, quantitatively . . . and also internally, qualitatively, by immediate intuition . . . Here is our only complete clue . . . to concrete spatio-temporal reality.”

These convictions aim not to repeat the kind of naïve anthropocentrism that all are anxious to avoid. Teilhard (1959, 224) rightly insists, “Man is not the centre of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful . . . Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle of all the successive layers of life.” This is not an affirmation of the universe as anthropocentric; rather, it is an affirmation of the human phenomenon as anthropocosmic. Both Whitehead and Hartshorne would fully agree with Teilhard (1916) in this regard: “[T]he human monad, is, like every monad, essentially cosmic.” Indeed, Chinese Confucian scholar Tu Weiming (2010, 7307; b. 1940) articulates this view of humans as “not merely creatures, but co-creators of the cosmic process,” insisting that “[w]e must take responsibility for this anthropocosmic interplay.” It is the affirmation of this anthropocosmic responsibility, however, that was abnegated by modern thought and replaced by the metaphysical myth that we are truly alienated from the cosmos.

Central to process extraterrestrial metaphysics, therefore, is the recovery of our response-ability to see ourselves as anthropocosmic facts of the universe and in no way a deviation from it. In order for metaphysics to be extraterrestrial, there must be metaphysical continuity between ourselves and the wider stretches of the cosmos we inhabit. Moreover, in countering modern nihilistic convictions that we are cosmologically aimless, we find that this anthropocosmic recovery supports not only our longing to be at home in the universe but also our be-longing to it. What this involves, I submit, is a fundamental faith in nature and what it expresses through us. “The faith in the order of nature which has made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper faith,” Whitehead (1967a, 18) reminds us, “It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate experience . . . To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality.” Extraterrestrial metaphysics is based in a metaphysical faith that we express the very depths of reality, and it finds its purpose in the tentative identification of these depths and their imaginative extension beyond Earth.

Life and Living Ontology

Extraterrestrial metaphysics does not deal with certainties but with what Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 5) calls “imaginative generalization” from concrete experience. We should admit that there are no immediately clear and obvious answers to what the “utmost depths of reality” are in terms of metaphysical primacy. “Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious,” Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 8) states, “they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities [of nature].” To say that metaphysics is tentative is to presuppose its revisability in dialogue with incoming data from the best of our terrestrial scientific disciplines. In striving for consistency with these disciplines, it must also be adequate to human experience. It is a matter of fact, however, that the methodological omission of human experience has been one of the most pervasive “blind spots” in the development of modern science and philosophy (Frank et al. 2024). After all, a dead mechanistic-materialistic universe is precisely the kind of universe that emerges when living human experience is taken out of it. A method became a metaphysics, and our continuity with the cosmos was broken.

The immediate proclamation of our anthropocosmic experience is that we are living and not dead. Thus, Life—its very concept and possibility—emerges as a candidate as to the “utmost depths” belonging to extraterrestrial metaphysics. This claim will naturally be met with skepticism. It is worth noting, however, that such skepticism remains historically in the minority. Indeed, a vital shift took place from the priority of life to priority of death in the transitional march from ancient to modern cosmological conceptions. As emphasized by both Robert Rosen (1934–98) and Hans Jonas (1903–93), this involved a metaphysical transition embodied in a march toward death. As Rosen (1991, 11) states, “Ironically, the idea that life requires explanation is a relatively new one. To the ancients, life simply was; it was a given; a first principle in terms of which other things had to be explained. Life vanished as an explanatory principle with the rise of mechanics.” The vanishing of life, according to Jonas (1966, 9), occurred by means of its negation such that death became the reigning principle: “Modern thought . . . is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation [of the ancients]. Death is the natural thing, life the problem . . . Our thinking today is under the ontology of death . . . a universe alien to life and indifferent in its material laws.”² The problem, of course, is that a universe that is truly “alien to life” is not one in which you would expect to find any alien life at all. It is far from obvious that an “ontology of death” would ever produce even one instance of life; nor can it, in principle, ever harbor its possibly. Nevertheless, we find that both life and its possibility are actual in us as anthropocosmic expressions of the universe.

It seems plausible to claim that if the possibly of life belongs to the universe, then the actuality of life must be realized somewhere (otherwise we might question if it is truly possible). We might further claim that the possibility of life would not belong to the universe unless the universe was in the business of bringing life into being (at least once). We know this has occurred on our planet, and there is nothing in the nature of possibility that restricts such realization to only one planetary occurrence. From the perspective of extraterrestrial metaphysics, the fact that the universe harbors the very possibility of life is already a philosophical context from which to speak to what astronomer and former NASA chief historian Steven J. Dick (b. 1949) calls the “biological universe.” “The central assumptions of the biological universe are that planetary systems are common,” Dick states, “that life originates wherever conditions are favorable” (2000, 191).³ Indeed, if life is a “cosmic imperative,” as Christian de Duve (1917–2013) argued, then we expect it to emerge and re-emerge where it is possible to do so (2011). Extraterrestrial metaphysics pushes still deeper, however. Beneath the multitude of real conditions that make life possible on any particular planetary habitat, is the pure possibility of life itself which belongs inexorably to the nature of things. This fact is far from insignificant. When taken seriously, it requires the inversion of the “ontology of death” completely. “Life startles us at first; it seems somewhat beyond the law, somewhat contrary to nature, somewhat like a transitory counteraction to the dark eternal fountains [of death],” says the Cretan poet and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), “but deeper down we feel that Life is itself without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe” (1960, 41).⁴

Where Whitehead developed a “philosophy of organism” as a “atomic theory of actuality” (1987, 27), Teilhard developed a “hyper-Physics” or “hyper-Biology” that is “both organic and atomic” in nature (1947). Both men rejected clear divides between living and nonliving entities, with Whitehead stressing that there is “no absolute gap between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’” organic systems (1987, 102) and Teilhard admitting that at atomic depths “all differences seem to become tenuous” so that “we can no more fix an absolute zero in time (as was once supposed) for the advent of life” (1959, 77). For both men, it can be said that prior to the emergence of what we recognize as highly evolved “living” organisms, there are still-more-fundamental organisms that exhibit active evolution, dynamic response, and purposive internal relations to their environment.

Experience seems to demonstrate that organic systems may be “living” or “non-living,” but “non-living” hardly means dead. “Non-life” or what Teilhard calls “pre-life” might be said to be the limit case of life, but it may be quite wrong to insist it is lifeless. “In a coherent perspective of the world,” Teilhard (1959, 57) states, “life inevitably assumes a ‘pre-life’ for as far back before it as the eye can see,” and is present in an elementary form even at the lowest level of nature. Speaking within the context of Whiteheadian ontology, Lewis Ford (1933–2018) stresses life as a degree concept: “The decisive difference between living and [non-living] matter . . . is the difference between novel and habitual response. . . This may well be a matter of degree, such that what we designate as living may simply be those instances where novelty dominates over habit” (Davis 2023, 166). Similarly, for Charles Sanders Pierce (1839–1914), “[w]hat we call dead matter is not completely dead” but rather (anticipating the next section of this article) “is merely mind-bound with habits. It still retains the element of diversification; and in that diversification, there is life” (Henning 2024, 253). As for Josiah Royce (1855–1916): “[W]e ought not speak of dead nature. We have a right only to speak of uncommunicative nature” ( Royce 1895, 586).

Each of these perspectives resonates with Whitehead’s intuition that “an organism [can be considered] ‘alive’ when in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical inheritance” (Whitehead 1987, 104). This novel reactionary ability however, so highly expressed in human life, is never wholly absent even at the far side of his primitive ontology: “Life implies the absolute, individual self-enjoyment arising out of [a] process of appropriation,” he states. Indeed, it is this “individual act of immediate self-enjoyment” which is the active heart of his ontology (Whitehead 1968, 150–51). As he insists, “the root principles of life are, in some lowly form, exemplified in all types of physical existence” (Whitehead 1929, 16–17).

What this entails, I submit, is that for process extraterrestrial metaphysics, the atomic processes of nature are more accurately conceived as living rather than dead. The fundamental organisms of Whitehead’s (1968, 150–52) ontology can be said to be living events whose embodiment of life is grounded in the temporal dynamics of their individual and collective becoming, response and relationality to their universal environment. As a hallmark of process metaphysics, dynamic becoming is more fundamental than static being, and it is these spatiotemporal events—what Whitehead terms “actual occasions” or “actual entities”—that are the living ontological sparks of his evolutionary cosmology.

In holding to “a world that is being born instead of a world that is,” Teilhard (2004, 80) in no way reserves these statements only to higher achievements of evolution; rather, they must retrospectively apply to the very depths of his ontology. Cosmogenesis in this way presupposes a deeper ontogenesis such that the universe is always giving birth. He offers a similar vision to Whitehead where “duration permeates the essence of every being” so that “[e]very particle of reality, instead of constituting an approximate point in itself, extends from the previous fragment to the next in an invisible thread running back to infinity” (Teilhard 2004). That this process is more accurately conceived as living is supported by Teilhard’s (1947) conviction that “Life is not an epi-phenomenon in the material universe, but the central phenomenon of evolution.” Indeed, that life is “a universal function of the cosmos” constitutes one of the original thematic points of his scientific work (Teilhard 1959, 303).

For both Whitehead and Teilhard, therefore, it can be said that Life signifies an ultimate principle that is always embodied in a processual ontology. It is this living ontology that constitutes the antecedent conditions of all higher life achieved throughout cosmogenesis. For both men, moreover, this is not insignificant when considering what evolution is ultimately about. We might put it in the following way: where life in a primitive processual form belongs inexorably to the universe as such, there is no meaning to evolution beyond the higher achievement, complexification, and intensification of life. This has been demonstrated on our planet, and it will necessarily occur on other planets where conditions are ripe. While Teilhard (2002, 232) insists that “we have no idea either of the chemistry or the morphology peculiar to the various extra-terrestrial forms of life,” he nevertheless speculates as to the prevalence of hominized “extra-terrestrial ‘mankinds’” saying, “[a]t an average of (at least) one human race per galaxy, that makes a total of millions of human races dotted all over the heavens.” Whitehead too holds that “the forms of life which might be lived on other stars millions of light-years away and millions hence could be infinite and admit every possibility that the imagination could conceive” (Price 2001, 280). Both men are joined by Hartshorne (1967, 16), who rightly asserts that we have “no right to assume” there are no “other inhabited planets.” He himself was strongly inclined to believe that there were (Miethe 1987, 142). These convictions are home to a process extraterrestrial metaphysics where life does not evolve from lifelessness and where living activity belongs to the ontological depths of a universe that produces life. Still, Life is not the only metaphysical category belonging to the “utmost depths of realty” for process extraterrestrial metaphysics.

Mind and Mind-Full Ontology

There is no metaphysical reason to think that mind is a foreign invader into the cosmos any more than life; nor is there any reason to think that mind on planet Earth is somehow ultimately lonesome. Such a conviction is an unjustified nod toward a kind of cosmological solipsism that, as Teilhard (2002, 43) states, “reminds us of the philosopher who claims to reduce the whole of the real to his own consciousness, so exclusively as to deny true existence to other men.” In speaking of our planet as “insignificant: a mote in the cathedral of space, barely visible even from our neighboring planets,” Philip Ball (2022; b. 1962) has recently posed the following question: “Is it conceivable that all the mindedness that exists in the universe is concentrated into this infinitesimal volume?” He answers: “Intuitively that makes no sense, although no one can exclude the possibility” (Ball 2002). I would submit, however, that this slim possibility can in fact be excluded based upon the much larger space of possible minds to which Ball himself assents. Ball (2022) remains humble: “Might it then be equally true that all we can say about mind based on our experience on Earth is similarly parochial: That the Space of Possible Minds is equally vast and unknown, and we await a Copernican revolution to open our eyes to it?” Alternatively, it may be the case that “the Mindspace” we have already begun to explore on this planet “is more akin to the Periodic Table of the chemical elements, a kind of universal map of what there is and can be?” For Ball (2022, 333), “the concept of a Mindspace” is fruitful in offering a framework for thinking about kinds of mind that might exist beyond the edge of our world.” Indeed, it is fruitful because it is ontologically real: the space of possible minds is not a fiction. It was there in the nature of things before any particular mind conceived it.

Philosophical cosmologist George F. R. Ellis (b. 1939) has clarified further that internal to the space of possible minds is also the infinite possibility space for what highly evolved minds do, namely, think thoughts. The possibility space for thoughts “itself was there at the start of the universe before life began,” Ellis insists, “and will be there in the far future when all life has died out” (Davis, forthcoming, 2026). He reminds us: “You can’t think a thought unless it is possible to think it!—and this possibility space embodies that far from trivial fact” (Ellis, forthcoming, 2026). For extraterrestrial metaphysics, this fact is non-trivial because where there is possibility of mind, there can be actuality of mind. We can again hold the position that the possibility of mind would not belong to the universe unless the universe was in the business of bringing about not just minds but conscious thinking minds (at least once). A truly bewildering variety of minds have found expression on our planet, and there is again nothing in the space of possible minds that requires cosmological solipsism.

For process extraterrestrial metaphysics, it is one thing to ontologically affirm the very possibility of mind and another to conceive theoretically how mind emerges, advances, and complexifies into consciousness over cosmological evolution. Process philosophy is not alone in this. It belongs to the ideals of science and metaphysics alike to seek continuity rather than discontinuity throughout an evolutionary cosmos. Arguably, however, nowhere has the ideal of continuity been so travestied than in the philosophy of mind, especially when caged within a reductive materialist (and thus mind-less) metaphysics. It is this metaphysics, we must remember, that produces the so-called “hard problem” of how it is that qualitative states of conscious experience can emerge from purely quantitative physical states wholly devoid of experience. Here, we can agree with William James’s (1842–1910) claim that the “demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power.” But this prophetic power was not honored with respect to the origin of consciousness. James (1890, 148) continues: “We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.” A reductive materialist metaphysics, however, admits precisely the kind of mental interruption James advises against.

For process extraterrestrial metaphysics, the vital place to start conceiving “the dawn of consciousness” is the critique of that “scientific reasoning,” which, as Whitehead (1968, 156) states, unjustly presupposes “that mental functionings are not properly part of nature.” The consequence of this presupposition is that “all those mental antecedents which mankind habitually presuppose as effective in guiding cosmological functioning” are simply ignored (Whitehead 1968, 156). Put differently, the evolution of mind is rendered wholly mysterious when our anthropocosmic experience is disregarded. As Whitehead (1968, 156) puts it, “this sharp division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation. We find ourselves living within nature . . . I conclude that we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constituents of nature.”

With reference to Ball’s comment above, it is here that process extraterrestrial metaphysics can indeed point to a post-materialistic Copernican revolution with respect to the extent of mind in nature. This revolution is now in full swing. Although once ridiculed, varieties of panpsychism are now included as mainstream options for accounting for the origin and advent of consciousness in the universe.⁵ It is significant that a general consensus is now emerging as to the depth of consciousness in nature. On April 19, 2024, for example, thirty-eight researchers from a variety of life science fields, among them several philosophers and historians of science, signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which affirmed “strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience” and a “realistic possibility” of such experience in insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish, and other creatures (Falk 2024). Such a position, however, was already pre-figured at a far lower level, with evidence showing that even bacteria make decisions and have memory.⁶ Just how far down does mind extend? Based upon our anthropocosmic continuity with nature, process philosophers and theologians have long anticipated the current revival in panpsychism.⁷

It is worth recalling that Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” emerged in light of the fact that “matter” as inert and vacuous in nature had essentially melted into something far more fluid and active in nature. As he stresses, Newtonian physics was based upon “the individuality of each bit of matter,” but “bit by bit” this concept was “given away, or dissolved, by the advance of modern physics” (Whitehead 1967b, 156–57). It was clear for Whitehead (1967a, 36): once you get rid of matter and the illusion of its “undifferentiated endurance,” there is no good reason “to provide another more subtle stuff” to take its place. Matter had liquified into energetic activity, and he found this deeply suggestive. For Whitehead, however, even the physicist’s concept of “energy” was an abstraction from a more fundamental ontological activity.

We saw earlier that Whitehead conceives this activity in terms of the living becoming of events. These events he more fully describes as “actual occasions of experience.” “‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world is made up,” he states (Whitehead [1929] 1978, 18). “There is no going behind actual entities to find something more real . . . [T]he final facts are, all alike, actual entities: and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, 18; emphasis added). Indeed, Whitehead holds to what David Ray Griffin (1939–2022) calls a “panexperientialist” ontology where mind in the form of becoming experience descends all the way down to the lowest level of nature (Griffin 1998, 2002). The uniqueness of Whitehead’s panexperientialism in particular consists in its psycho-physical dipolarity, wherein every event emerges from the past to the future through the receptive and anticipatory functions of both a physical and mental pole. With the physical pole, the event receives the past (via efficient causation) and with the mental pole, the event anticipates the future and “decides” (via final causation) among available possibilities for its own becoming. For Whitehead, therefore, both the physical and the mental belong together in what he terms the “concrescence” (becoming concrete) of each occasion of experience. As he stresses, it is mind in nature that constitutes the very basis of novelty such that if nature were finally mind-less, nothing truly novel could occur in evolution. “[M]ental experience is the organ of novelty,” he states, “the urge beyond” in all finite events as they “vivify the massive physical fact, which is repetitive, with the novelties which become” (Whitehead 1929, 26–27). For Whitehead, it is mind that releases nature from its determination by an antecedent past.

According to Teilhard (1959, 56), co-extensive with the without of nature is also a within so that nature shows “a double aspect to its structure” where exteriority and interiority ascend the evolutionary scale together. Against materialist and idealists alike, he affirms with Whitehead a form of dual aspect monism where mind and matter are “the two aspects or connected parts of one and the same phenomenon” (Teilhard 1959, 61).⁸ While Teilhard (1959, 57) will often use the language of “consciousness” for the domain of psyche at very low levels of reality, he clarifies that this term “is taken in its widest sense to indicate every kind of psychism, from the most rudimentary forms of interior perception imaginable to the human phenomenon of reflective thought.” In making this important distinction, Teilhard guards himself against common (although often shortsighted) critiques of panpsychism as the incredulous position that everything is simply conscious. Using the notion of “experience” rather than “consciousness,” Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 53) is better positioned to avoid this critique for, as he stresses, “consciousness presupposes experience and not experience consciousness.” Thus, experience goes all the way down in nature, but consciousness does not. For both men, “consciousness” is a late emergent phase in the evolution of wildly complex “living” organisms involving incredibly layered synchronizations of mental activity that blossom into what Teilhard (1959, 57) calls “reflective thought” and Whitehead (1967a, 144) the “function of knowing.” The evolutionary lateness of consciousness notwithstanding, in the primitive form of experiential activity, the place of mind in nature remains irreducible.

As discussion and acceptance of various forms of panpsychism and panexperientialism continue to expand, it is noteworthy that the implications beyond Earth have yet to be adequately explored. Here again the process philosophical tradition has already anticipated the importance of mind-full ontology for extraterrestrial metaphysics. Charles Hartshorne (2017, 256) recognized that a panpsychist view—what he called “psychicalism”—“implies the eternal existence of finite minds of some kind in the universe,” adding that one of the many ways this might be verified is “by the discovery of other inhabited planets.” Indeed, forty years before Thomas Nagel (1979; b. 1937) famously asked what it is like to be a bat, Hartshorne not only raised the same question of all organisms on Earth but also pointed to the viability of this question beyond Earth.⁹ What is it like to be an extraterrestrial?

Similarly, for Teilhard (1974, 231), cosmogenesis presupposes a deeper ontogenesis, which is noogenesis, and he recognizes the transplanetary implications: “[O]ur minds cannot resist the inevitable conclusion that were we, by chance, to possess plates that were sensitive to the specific radiation of the ‘noospheres’ scatted throughout space, it would be practically certain that what we saw registered on them would be a cloud of thinking stars.” Whitehead too recognizes that a living and mind-full ontology carries the imagination far beyond Earth:

I see no reason to suppose that the air about us and the heavenly spaces over us may not be peopled by intelligences, or entities, or forms of life, as unintelligible to us as we are to the insects. In the scale of size, the difference between the insects and us is nothing to that between us and the heavenly bodies; and—who knows?—perhaps the nebulae are sentient entities and what we can see of them are their bodies. That is not more inconceivable than that there may be insects who have acute minds, though . . . their outlook would be narrower than ours. (Price 2001, 233–34)

For Whitehead, this vast spectrum runs from the heavenly magnitudes above us to the insects below us and the air that we breathe. “[W]e are part of an infinite series,” he insists, “and since the series is infinite, we had better take account of that fact, and admit into our thinking these infinite possibilities” (Price 2001, 233–34).

As with Life, then, for process extraterrestrial metaphysics, it can be said that Mind signifies an ultimate principle that is always embodied in a mind-full ontology. It is this mind-full ontology that constitutes the antecedent conditions of all higher mind achieved throughout cosmogenesis, including the remarkable advent of conscious thought and reflection at high levels of evolutionary complexity. Here again it is worth noting the importance of this when considering the nature and workings of evolution. Where mind belongs inexorably to nature, there is no meaning to evolution beyond the higher achievement, complexification, and intensification of mental experience and, thus, the novel achievement of conscious thought throughout the universe. Along with life, process extraterrestrial metaphysics insists that mind does not evolve from mindlessness; rather, mental activity belongs to the ontological depths of a universe that produces mind. Both life and mind are ontologically related and rise together in the drama of cosmological evolution. It is in this sense that not merely “panpsychism” or “panexperientialism” can be affirmed by process extraterrestrial metaphysics but also “biopsychism,” wherein life and mind are tangled concomitants that are never wholly absent from the deepest level of realty.¹⁰ Still, Life and Mind do not exhaust the “utmost depths” embodied in process extraterrestrial ontology.

Value and Value-Full Ontology

Virtually every debate concerning value on Earth can also be extended beyond Earth. The fact that these debates exist is evidence enough that it belongs to life and mind to respond to value—its possibility, nature, and character—and its many rational, ethical, and aesthetic forms. That we experience the domain of value as anthropocosmic expressions of the universe must be an essential focal point for any extraterrestrial metaphysics. In recent years, various proposals have emerged offering different considerations of value for the space age, whether “astroethics,” “cosmocentric ethics,” “astropolicy,” or the wider endeavors I have termed “exo-axiology.”¹¹ As shown in fresh calls for the transplanetary exploration of value, the question of axiology and its relationship to life and mind remain an important part of current discussions. It is significant that these “calls” are also indebted to process metaphysics.¹²

From the perspective of process extraterrestrial metaphysics, there is no escape from real domains of value in the universe. Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, whether presupposed in the rational endeavors of science, the ethical endeavors of morality, or the aesthetic endeavors of art and creativity, are not clever inventions on our planet alone but dis-coverings in our anthropocosmic experience of deeper qualitative realms of possibility that hibernate in the nature of things. For example, in saying that “scientific interest is merely a variant form of religious interest,” Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 16) points to “the scientific devotion to ‘truth,’ as an ideal” as confirming this statement. While he certainly agrees that, in principle, “[j]udgments of worth are no part of the texture of physical science,” he does insist that they “are part of the motive of its production” (Whitehead 1967c, 151). Indeed, “without judgments of value there would have been no science” (Whitehead 1967c, 151). Truth in this regard is an utmost value presupposed by scientific efforts to understand.

One of Whitehead’s most adamant critiques of the “senseless, valueless, purposeless” metaphysis of mechanistic materialism is its divorcing of fact from value. “We shall never elaborate an explanatory metaphysics unless we abolish this notion of valueless, vacuous existence,” he states (Whitehead 1929, 24). He instead praises the poetic response offered by nature poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge to “lifeless” nature as portrayed by “scientific naturalism.” “Remembering the poetic rendering of our concrete experience, we see at once that the element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual something,” he states (Whitehead 1967a, 93). “‘Value’ is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event. Value is an element which permeates through and through the poetic view of nature” (Whitehead 1967a, 93).

Whitehead shares this poetic view. The most fundamental sparks of life and mind at the base of reality (actual occasions) are not valueless but valuable in and for themselves. They are permeated with intrinsic value in their very reality of becoming. The world bears witness to “the becomingness of real values” (Whitehead 2021, 52) such that “[e]xistence, in its own nature, is the upholding of value-intensity” (Whitehead 1968, 111). The evolutionary rise of the world process is conceived as a value process presupposing real standards of value and also possibilities of achievable value resident in the womb of nature. Just as life and mind go all the way down in nature, so also does value for process extraterrestrial ontology. It is in this sense that one can speak not only of “panexperientialism” but also of what Victor Lowe (1990, 168, 270; 1907–1988) calls “pan-valuism.” As Nathaniel Barrett (2023, 345) has recently argued, Whitehead’s panexperientialism is also a “pan-axiological view of nature.” Indeed, where the very becoming into being (concrescence) of every occasion is a living valuational process, where possibilities of value are experientially felt (prehended), actualized, and then transferred on to the birth of subsequent occasions, Philip Rose (2001, 3) is right to say that “to be” for Whitehead “is to be the source of values given and the centre of values felt.” Far from maintaining the modern divorce of fact from value, Whitehead (1968, 111) actively mends it: “Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. This characterizes the meaning of actuality.” The rise of the evolutionary process shows definitively that value is inherent in the making of fact, and fact is the attainment of value.

It belongs to process extraterrestrial metaphysics in the tradition of Whitehead and Hartshorne to affirm aesthetic value as the widest and most inclusive form of value applicable to the universe at all scales. All order is aesthetic order, even the order exhibited in the “laws” of nature and the presupposed formational capacities of our world. Hartshorne (1991, 590) states: “The most general principles of harmony and intensity are more ultimate than the laws of physics and are the reasons for there being natural laws.” Put differently, the laws of nature are already an expression of deeper aesthetic principles of harmony, intensity, and coherence. These statements by Hartshorne echo Whitehead’s (1926, 91–92) own conviction that “the foundations of the world” are grounded in the “aesthetic order” and that the world itself “is the outcome of aesthetic order.” As Whitehead (1926, 104) underscores, this order is prior to the world itself: “It is not the case that there is an actual world which accidentally happens to exhibit an order of nature. There is an actual world because there is an order in nature. If there were no order, there would be no world. Also since there is a world, we know that there is an order.” For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, the nature of this order—of any order—is aesthetic.

Just as consciousness dawns through compounding synchronizations of highly evolved occasions of experience, so too does moral value dawn in the context of highly evolved forms of aesthetic value (namely conscious life). “[T]he moral order is merely certain aspects of the aesthetic order,” Whitehead (1926, 91) states. That aesthetic value is deeper than moral value is not a subordination of morality to aesthetics; rather, it is a statement expressing the evolutionary origins and roots of morality. While there are primitive stages of the universe where moral value is simply not applicable for both Whitehead and Hartshorne, there is no stage of the universe where aesthetic value is not applicable. Whitehead (1929, 19), for example, speaks of some early epoch of the universe “in which the dominant trend was the formation of protons, electrons, molecules and stars.” While ethical or moral activity makes littles sense at this level, aesthetic activity and achievement are replete, for protons, electrons, molecules, and stars are themselves achievements of harmony, intensity, and coherence in the universe.

Thus, for process extraterrestrial metaphysics, moral order presupposes aesthetic order. All levels of life and experience exhibit hierarchies of aesthetic value attainment, and it is only within this context that morality can genuinely arise. Put differently, the high-grade “ethical” and “moral” concerns of conscious experience are awakened evolutionary expressions of the primordiality of aesthetic value experience as it pervades the universe. “With the emergence of conscious alternatives of action ethics becomes possible” Lewis Ford states, “for now, some alternatives may be experienced as better and others as worse” (Davis 2023, 168). According to Whitehead (1968, 1), persistent intuitions like better, worse, “importance,” and ideals are in fact “ultimate notions” that haunt life and mind in the cosmos. We have awoken to these ultimate ideals on our planet, and so too will on any other planet where life meets or exceeds our conscious capacities. David Ray Griffin (2014, 88) thus rightly comments, “On other planets with the conditions for life to emerge and to evolve for many billions of years, we should expect there to be some with creatures that, no matter how different in physical constitution and appearance, would share some of our capacities, such as those for mathematics, music and morality, or, more generally, truth, beauty and goodness.”

To hold that morality can and will arise on other planets for process extraterrestrial metaphysics is not to insist that morality or ethics can be rigidly codified in ways that are universally applicable to all beings in the cosmos. Whitehead, in fact, strongly rejects this, saying “the notion that there are certain regulative notions, sufficiently precise to prescribe details of conduct, for all reasonable beings on Earth, in every planet, and in every star-system, is at once to be put aside.” Such an idea is based in the conviction that there is “one type of perfection at which the Universe aims.” In denying this, Whitehead (1967b, 291) insists that “[a]ll realization of the Good is finite, and necessarily excludes certain other types.” We can agree with Ford in this regard: “What goodness means for other intelligent beings may well be beyond the bounds of our imagination, but it might be just possible to define a general criterion underlying all concrete embodiments” (Davis 2023, 168). For Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Ford alike, this “general criterion” has to do with the expansion of freedom and intensity toward beautiful ends.

In the context of recent philosophy of cosmology and astrobiology,¹³ talk of the “anthropic cosmological principle” can be misleading if thought to indicate that the fundamental constants of the universe—with their truly striking limitations—are such as to produce human life and intelligence. This does risk a kind of anthropocentrism that is inappropriate in the context of the current discussion. For process extraterrestrial metaphysics, it is more appropriate to speak of what John F. Haught (2000, 128; b. 1942) has called the “aesthetic cosmological principle.” This principle insists upon the universal tendency toward the creation of value and beauty, of which human life and mind on this planet are but one possible expression alongside a myriad of others in the universe. Haught (2017, 140) puts it succinctly: “The aim toward aesthetic intensity is the central theme of the cosmic story, and subjectivity is the most intense concentration of the cosmic aim toward beauty.” In saying this, Haught has merely restated Whitehead’s (1967b, 265) own fundamental refrain: “The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of beauty.”

For process extraterrestrial metaphysics, therefore, it can be said that Value too signifies an ultimate principle belonging to the “utmost depths of reality,” one that is always expressed in a living and mind-full process ontology. Where there is life and mind, there is also value as experienced and value as achieved. As with primordial possibilities of Life and Mind, so too are there primordial possibilities of Value associated with them. This haunting fact should again alter our understanding of the means and meanings of cosmological evolution. Where value belongs to an evolutionary ontology of life and mind, there is no meaning to evolution beyond the higher achievement and intensification of value. Such value has been achieved in human beings and the myriad other forms of life and intelligence on this planet, and it will be also achieved on other planets in ways unimaginable. As Thomas Nagel (2012, 119–20) has queried: “[W]ho knows what unimaginable forms of life and their associated value exist elsewhere in the universe, unrelated to us by common descent?” While the imagination runs wild, for process extraterrestrial metaphysics, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are hardly confined to a small planet on the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Contours of Process–Relational Cosmotheology

In broaching the kind of theological vision engendered by process extraterrestrial metaphysics, it serves us to remember just how tangled metaphysics, cosmology, and theology have been in the Western intellectual tradition. Augustine (354–430) imbibed and transformed the metaphysics of Plato (428–348 BCE) and Plotinus (204–70) to formulate his own theological insights in resonance with fourth-century cosmology. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) mined the metaphysics of Aristotle (384–22) to form the foundations of the scholastic theological tradition in resonance with thirteenth-century cosmology. It is noteworthy today that Aristotelian, Platonic, Thomistic, and other metaphysical framings continue to undergird a variety of astro-, exo-, and comotheological proposals exploring the relation of God to a vast and unfolding cosmology, unknown to the ancients.¹⁴

For process philosophers and theologians, it remains an ongoing debate as to which metaphysical vision best situates cosmological evolution as the grand metanarrative of the universe and, concomitantly, what both require as to our understanding of divine existence and activity. Underscoring the paradigm shift of the new cosmology, Whitehead (1964, 211) stresses, “[O]n a grand scale, our cosmology discloses a process of overpowering change . . . We can no longer conceive of existence under the metaphor of a permanent depth of ocean with its surface faintly troubled by transient waves. There is an urge in things which carries the world far beyond its ancient conditions.” Similarly, Teilhard (2004, 261) is adamant that we “must of necessity proceed from the fundamental change of view which since the sixteenth century has been steadily exploding and rendering fluid what had seemed to be the ultimate stability—our concept of the world itself. To our clearer vision the universe is no longer an Order but a Process. The cosmos has become a Cosmogenesis.”

For process cosmotheology, theology cannot remain unchanged by these new revelations of cosmological evolution. Following Whitehead, process philosophers and theologians have stressed God’s relationship to the cosmic process as complementary rather than contradictory. “In the first place,” Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 343) famously states, “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.” The radicalism of this statement for extraterrestrial metaphysics is that God too is to be understood in terms of embodying the same metaphysical depths as the cosmos, albeit preeminently. Rather than supernaturally establishing them (and thereby standing exterior to them), God is their embodied context and culmination. It is this move for Whitehead that categorically bars so-called “supernatural action” from “outside” the world and makes divine activity part and parcel of the world’s normal, natural processes and never their competition or interruption. “God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, or destructive force with destructive force,” Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 346) states; rather, following Plato, who made “one of greatest intellectual discovery in the history of religion,” the “divine element” in the universe is to be understood “as a persuasive agency and not as a coercive agency” (Whitehead 1967b, 167). For Whitehead (1967b, 130), the world does not submit to “the imposed will of a transcendent God”; rather, “the existents in nature are sharing in the nature of the immanent God.” Competitive and coercive power is thus metaphysically denied in Whitehead’s cosmotheology.

This is not insignificant for extraterrestrial metaphysics. As David Ray Griffin has rightly argued, any philosophical theology must explain why our world—and the vast plurality of worlds—have come about through an inconceivably long evolutionary process: “This question is difficult for traditional theism, given its doctrine of omnipotence based on creation ex nihilo, according to which there was no necessity for our world to have come about through a long, slow evolutionary process.” Griffin (2001, 212–13) also stresses that this question is equally “difficult for atheism given its view that there is no purpose behind the evolutionary process, which makes the upward trend wholly mysterious.” Process cosmotheology responds to both quandaries: the cosmic evolutionary trend has been upward because the divine impetus always seeks richer achievement of what is ontologically implicit, namely, life, mind, and value; and this process has taken so inconceivably long because divine power is always persuasive and never coercive in nature.¹⁵

Teilhard (1974) recognized clearly that “the organic vastness of the universe obliges us to rethink the notion of divine omni-sufficiency” and “make a further adjustment in our thought as affects the idea of omnipotence.” Underscoring Griffin’s point, Teilhard stresses that in traditional theological conception, God was able to create (1) instantaneously, (2) isolated beings, (3) as often as he pleased. Yet, he stresses the dubiousness of theses convictions in light of a truly evolutionary cosmos: “We are now beginning to see that creation can have only one object: a universe; that (observed ab intra) creation can be effected only by an evolutive process” (Teilhard 1974). What is more, for Teilhard (1974, 178–79), this “recognition that ‘God cannot create except evolutively provides a radical solution . . . to the problem of evil,” which he conceives (with both Whitehead and Hartshorne) as “a direct ‘effect’ of evolution.”

Whitehead shows remarkable similarity to Teilhard on these points. He further emphasizes the incoherence of traditional affirmations of omniscience and omnipotence in light of evil and imperfection, and the collaborative nature of the God–world relationship toward the achievement of risky, but worthwhile, ends. “It was a mistake . . . to conceive of God as creating the world from the outside, at one go,” he states. “An all-foreseeing Creator, who could have made the world as we find it . . . Foreseeing everything and yet putting into it all sorts of imperfections.” Rejecting this, Whitehead stresses: “There is a general tendency in the universe to produce worth-while things, and moments come when we can work with it and it can work through us. But that tendency in the universe to produce worth-while things is by no means omnipotent” (Price 2001, 370). As Hartshorne (1984) provocatively put it: omnipotence is a “theological mistake.”

For process cosmotheology, therefore, divine power and knowledge are re-thought based upon the general revelation inherent in the new cosmology. God’s power, in particular, can be conceived as God’s indefatigable patience that persuades the cosmos to reach its highest possibilities. In omnisciently knowing these possibilities as possibilities (not actualities), God offers the world the means for their achievement; yet, as befits a truly creative and relational cosmos, God must await the world’s choice. It is in this sense that Lewis Ford speaks of “God’s cosmological function” as consisting in the provision of that “impetus toward greater complexification we discover operative throughout the natural order.” Ford rightly clarifies however that “[t]his does not mean that God acts efficiently as one of the causal antecedent conditions out of which the present event emerges. We do not wish to repeat the fundamental error of those who portray God as the maker or mechanic, or artisan of the world, for all these images imply that God forms the world through force or coercion. Rather he serves as a lure for actualization, providing novel possibilities of achievement, thereby persuading each creature to create itself” (Davis 2023, 162–63). That creation is always co-creation is an abiding theme for process cosmotheology. God, as Teilhard (1966, 25) states, “does not so much ‘make’ things as ‘make them make themselves.’” Hartshorne too quotes Charles Kingsley (1984, 73) approvingly: God “makes things make themselves.”

What else can be said of God’s description and function for process cosmotheology? I’ve stressed both that process extraterrestrial metaphysics is affirmative of Life, Mind, and Value as among the ultimate “metaphysical categories” belonging to the universe and that these categories always find embodiment in a fluid anthropocosmic ontology conceived as living, mind-full, and value-full. Nevertheless, fundamental riddles arise for process extraterrestrial metaphysics: What finally renders a universe of this nature and character possible at all? What accounts for its metaphysical stability? Where do standards of value and pure possibilities of Life, Mind, and Value come from? What, indeed, explains the emergence of each event among such possibilities and values? Fundamental questions of meaning also confront us: What finally comes of the values achieved throughout cosmological evolution? Do they simply pass into nothingness and dissolve as if they never were? Process cosmotheology does not shy away from such questions; rather, it situates them within a portrait of God as the chief exemplification of Life, the all-inclusive Mind, and the everlasting preservation of Value.

John Cobb and Charles Birch (1990, 195, 197) argue that “[t]he Whiteheadian idea of God is appropriately called Life not only because the immanence of God in the world is the life-giving principle, but also because the life-giving principle is itself alive.” For them, this follows inexorably because a “lifeless principle could not ground or explain the urge to aliveness that permeates the universe.” As they stress, God as “Life” does not “aim specifically at the creation of human beings . . . on our planet” but rather achieves “rich value in dolphins as well as human beings. We cannot guess the forms it may have achieved on other worlds” (Cobb and Birch 1990, 195, 197). Indeed, for Whitehead, it is God’s “initial aim” that ultimately gives life to each occasion so that it can become into being as living, experiencing, and valuing. It is the divine lure that persuasively coaxes the evolutionary process toward higher life. Process cosmotheology thus affirms God as the Life without which there is no life—not even its possibility. As Kazantzakis (1960, 41) expresses: “[D]eeper down we feel that Life is itself without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe.” For process cosmotheology, there is no such thing as a metaphysical void; coherence requires that all ultimate principles require embodiment within actuality, the utmost expression of which is God (Whitehead 1987, 19, 40). Thus, God is conceived as the primordial embodiment of Life that gives life to each occasion.

Analogous to the mental poles of finite actual occasions, which navigate a limited set of possibilities and values relevant to their own becoming, what Whitehead calls the “primordial nature of God” is the divine mental pole that encompasses infinite possibility and value with urge for their realization in the world. A cosmos of creative evolutionary becoming presupposes the indispensability of possibility, but process philosophers and theologians have not been unaware of the metaphysical riddles posed by such possibility. Thomas Hosinski (2017, 77) states, “possibility is not self-explanatory. Where do possibilities come from? Must we simply say, as we do for energy, that possibilities just are? Must we simply assume them without being able to explain where they come from and how they function?” Similarly, James Lindsay (1922, 322) insists, we “cannot evade the question of the origin of possibilities . . . The philosophy of possibility can hardly be satisfied to accept these possibilities as accounting for themselves.”

Whitehead shares these sentiments. Possibilities cannot be nowhere; nor are they nothing. Rather, they have to be somewhere in actuality. A fundamental metaphysical correlation thus emerges for process extraterrestrial metaphysics: where there is possibility, there is mentality; and where possibilities transcend finite mentality (as they certainly do), there is infinite and necessary Mentality. In this way, Whitehead’s ([1929] 1978, 40, 46, 19) cosmotheology affirms a “doctrine of conceptualism” which, when viewed from its highest metaphysical altitude, coincides with “the primordial mind of God” as an all-inclusive actuality. It is out of this timeless depth of permanent mentality that God offers God’s self to the evolutionary process in the form of achievable possibilities of life, mind, and value. God is thereby conceived to be the all-inclusive Mind, without which there are no possibilities whatsoever. Indeed, it is God’s offering of novel possibilities that breaks the power of the past with an ever-arriving future so that higher life, mind, and value can be achieved in the universe.

Analogous to the physical poles of actual occasions that inherent and receive the objective past in the formation of themselves, so too does Whitehead’s God have a “consequent nature” that truly experiences, receives, and evolves through incorporating the cosmic process in every moment. This is not to be conceived as a passive process but as an active process of receptive transformation based in divine wisdom and sympathy. “The consequent nature of God is the realization of the world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom,” Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 345) states. God as consequent is the preservation of the past and therefore the very ground of truth: “The truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain adequate representation in the divine nature. Such representations compose the ‘consequent nature’ of God, which evolves in its relationship to the evolving world” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, 12–13). This divine evolution Whitehead conceives as God’s everlasting growth due to God’s abiding relationship to (and incorporation of) the infinite cosmic process. God’s growth in this regard is also God’s temporality (or historicity) such that—contrary to traditional theology—time is internal to God in the consequent nature. Thus, just as there would be no possibility (and thus no novel future) without the primordial nature of God, for Whitehead, there would be also no preserved past (and thus no historical truth) without the all-receptive evolution of divine experience in the consequent nature. Another metaphysical correlation emerges for process cosmotheology: where there is historical truth of any kind, there is impartial divine reception of that truth as distinguished from what might have otherwise been.

Whitehead knows well that a cosmos of becoming and perishing weighs upon its many inhabitants through existential angst, longing, and inevitable loss. “The ultimate evil of the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil,” he states, “It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing.’ . . . In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, 340). What indeed comes of our terrestrial experience and of all extraterrestrial experience in the universe? Is there any resolution to the conflicting and discordant dimensions of striving, anxiety, and turmoil in an evolutionary universe? Can any ultimate significance be assigned to our life—to any life—if we all inevitably perish into nothingness?

For process cosmotheology, all that is achieved in and among the plurality of worlds does not perish into nothingness; rather, it perishes into the consequent nature of God where it is imprinted, remembered, and judged against the ideals of the divine nature. “The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, 346). In this function, the consequent nature is also the ground of meaning—the memory and preservation of accomplished value in the cosmos. As Daniel A. Dombrowski (2016, 248) states, divine memory in this sense “is the paradigm case of experiencing and provides the avenue by which to best understand why perpetual perishing is not the last word. God is not a mere spectator, but a participant in the process of the world with ideal memory.” Indeed, to speak of God’s “ideal memory,” as Hartshorne (1984, 110) insists, is to affirm that “God forgets nothing, loses no value once acquired,” so that “our worth is imperishable in the divine life.” The divine memory, therefore, is that without which there is no truth or meaning at all.

Before drawing this discussion to a close, a final point needs to be emphasized as essential to extraterrestrial metaphysics in general, and process extraterrestrial metaphysics in particular. At the heart of process cosmotheology is the conviction that God is good. Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 346) famously speaks of God as “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” God’s persuasion of the plurality of worlds toward these objective values extends from the divine nature that is their ultimate contextual ground as they are realized in and through cosmological evolution. The claim that God is good is not an arbitrary supposition. God does not happen to be good when God might have been evil. Rather, Whitehead ([1929] 1978, 345) stresses that “necessary goodness” belongs to the divine nature and is ultimately justifying in ways that evil simply is not.¹⁶

This final claim of divine omnibenevolence, I submit, is essential to any extraterrestrial metaphysics, and indeed to any cosmotheological justification of a plurality of worlds and extraterrestrial life. As the theological tradition has long held, it belongs to divine goodness to be necessarily self-diffusive, that is, to give of itself endlessly to benevolent and worthwhile ends. Process cosmotheology upholds this conviction. The divine desire is for the cosmos to be all that it can be on behalf of truth, beauty, and goodness. Moreover, in the context of process extraterrestrial metaphysics, the abiding affirmation of divine goodness intimately unites two fundamental facts of our anthropocosmic experience, namely, continuous creation (creatio continua) and sheer cosmological plenitude. These facts are expressed in and through us and the billions of planets, stars, and forms of life, mind, and value that pervade the universe. In the final analysis, process extraterrestrial metaphysics is a metaphysics of multiplicity and plenitude because of the endless self-diffusion of divine goodness. We need only conclude by revisiting Whitehead’s plenitudinous wonder: “[T]he forms of life which might be lived on other stars millions of light-years away and millions hence could be infinite and admit every possibility that the imagination could conceive” (Price 2001, 280).

Conclusion

This discussion has been an exercise in extraterrestrial metaphysics in both theory and practice. In theory, it has stressed the nature of the metaphysical endeavor as consisting in the transplanetary pursuit of those abiding and indefatigable features of reality that necessarily obtain in any and all possible worlds. In practice, it has been a particular expression of extraterrestrial metaphysics on planet Earth. Inspired by Whitehead, Teilhard, Hartshorne, and a variety of others, process metaphysics is a fruitful, albeit still neglected, species of extraterrestrial metaphysics. I’ve argued that Life, Mind, and Value are among the ultimate principles and/or categories belonging to the “utmost depths of reality” and that these principles always find embodiment within a fluid anthropocosmic ontology conceived as living, mind-full, and value-full. I have also articulated some of the relevant contours of process cosmotheology as they relate to process extraterrestrial metaphysics, including some of the metaphysical riddles it addresses and the extraterrestrial plentitude it justifies through divine benevolence. Let it be emphasized, however, that this discussion is but one expression of the potential of process metaphysics as extraterrestrial. Other process philosophers and theologians will no doubt include other features and figures of a tradition that is diverse and still unfolding. What is more, process metaphysics is itself one of a variety of metaphysical traditions home to planet Earth. I extend an invitation to all terrestrial metaphysicians to become more deliberately extraterrestrial in both theory and practice. I finally submit that the metaphysical traditions unique to Earth are themselves examples of billions of others unfolding around other thinking stars. I need not invite them to become extraterrestrial.