Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifford D. Simak

Simak’s line dangles a cosmic family tree like a dare: strip away the romance of heritage and the scaffolding of status, and what’s left is a shared, gelatinous origin story. The sly power here is the conditional - “If the means were available” - which nods to science’s limits while insisting on science’s legitimacy. He’s not asking you to believe in ancestry as myth; he’s inviting you to imagine ancestry as data, a trail that could, in principle, be audited all the way down to the primordial goo.

The subtext is quietly radical. In a single “yours and mine,” Simak collapses class, nation, race, even species into one continuous narrative of matter learning to replicate. That move has moral implications without preaching them: if everyone’s lineage converges, then the stories we tell to justify hierarchy start to look like elaborate costumes worn over the same ancient body. It’s egalitarianism by biochemistry.

Context matters, too. Writing in a 20th-century America shaped by world wars, Cold War technocracy, and rapid advances in evolutionary biology and genetics, Simak often treated science fiction as a pressure test for human self-importance. Calling the first ancestor a “blob of life-like material” is deliberately unglamorous, a little comic, designed to puncture human exceptionalism. The intent isn’t to demean life; it’s to widen the frame until human pride seems provincial. In that widened frame, kinship stops being sentimental and starts being literal.