Making room for coexistence

Making room for coexistence is the difficult alternative Sigur Johanson proposes to either conquering the Yrr or expecting to understand them on human terms. It is not a promise of agreement or a demand that humanity adopt another species’ values. It is a change in human scale and conduct: people must relinquish claims of entitlement, recognize the limits of their understanding, and retreat far enough from their own assumptions to make a different kind of coexistence possible.

The limits of human understanding

Johanson develops the idea while questioning the proposal to protect American values in a first encounter with nonhuman intelligence. Samantha Crowe’s warning is that an intelligent life-form may have little in common with humans or mammals, perhaps not even DNA, and may operate within a moral and social framework unlike humanity’s. Johanson takes that difference seriously. A civilization grounded in cell division and self-sacrifice cannot be presumed to share the values by which human societies define ethics or political agreement.

That difference does not lead him to conclude that humanity should simply stop trying. He doubts people will ever truly understand how the Yrr think, yet argues that the history of conflict makes an effort necessary. The distinction is between trying to listen and imagining that listening will produce emotional comprehension or a common moral code. Understanding, in the sense of translating the Yrr into familiar human categories, cannot be the precondition for action; making room for what remains incomprehensible can.

From human rights to retreat

Johanson’s proposal challenges the idea that human expectations are naturally entitled to govern a shared habitat. He invokes Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and the Arctic, as well as animal species hunted to extinction, as histories that make any easy celebration of peaceful coexistence ring hollow. Humanity has repeatedly failed to leave room for beings whose lives and claims did not fit its own plans. The crisis with the Yrr therefore exposes a pattern, not just a new diplomatic problem.

The needed retreat is not the adoption of Yrr customs. Johanson argues that human culture is bound up with human genes and evolution; culture has enabled survival, but it has also carried forward war, social organization, and trade from prehistoric life into supposedly civilized forms. A demand that people simply exchange their culture for another species’ way of living would mistake the depth of that inheritance. His proposal instead asks humanity to scale back its claim to God-given rights and to take distance from itself as a species. That distance could let humans present the Yrr with something other than the same possessive perspective that has helped create the conflict.

Coexistence without consensus

The proposal is tested by an immediate objection: the Yrr are not leaving humanity in peace. If agreement between human and nonhuman values is impossible, and the other side continues its attacks, retreat can sound like surrender. Johanson’s answer is not that the danger has disappeared. He treats withdrawal as a possible condition for coexistence, not as a guarantee of safety or a declaration that the Yrr’s values should prevail. Neither side’s framework should automatically be imposed on the other; for the moment, however, it is humanity that must step back.

This is why making room is more demanding than a general appeal to tolerance. Johanson distinguishes coexistence from understanding another species emotionally, and from allowing that species’ values to rule. His comparison to conflict between Christians and Muslims makes the point that even human groups do not reliably reach consensus, yet the absence of consensus does not make every effort at coexistence meaningless. His practical claim is that people can change their vantage point without resolving every difference in belief. The retreat he imagines is a limit on human self-assertion, not proof that the two parties have become alike.

The sea as a test of human perspective

The novel’s images of the ocean give this argument a material setting. Its account of the continental shelf describes shallow waters as comparatively familiar and mastered, while the depths beyond it remain more mysterious to science than outer space. At sea, the horizon can dissolve into rain and cloud until there are no visual markers to distinguish sky from water. These descriptions unsettle the confidence that the world is readily legible from a human point of view.

At greater depths, familiar perception loses authority: vision and the inner ear cannot reliably tell a diver whether they are rising or falling, leaving the depth gauge as a necessary guide. The ocean is not merely a backdrop to the dispute with the Yrr; it is an environment in which human senses and habits of orientation prove inadequate. Likewise, the tsunami sequence shows how little the sea’s most consequential movement may announce itself at first: a wave less than a metre high travels over a vast area before changing when it reaches the shallow shelf. These contrasts echo Johanson’s demand for epistemic humility. What humans cannot see or interpret is not therefore absent, harmless, or organized according to human expectations.

Making room for coexistence consequently joins an ethical argument to a problem of perception. Johanson does not resolve the conflict by supplying a shared language or a reassuring account of the Yrr’s intentions. He argues instead that humanity must recognize the limits of its own knowledge and inherited claims, and alter its conduct without first becoming certain of what the other intelligence is. The idea leaves the danger intact; its significance lies in refusing to treat human dominance as the only possible response to what humans cannot understand.