Dear Rabbi Lamm, Well, after nearly a year of computerized typesetting – mistake-making type and should be computerized – the book is all set up within and will be printed in a couple of weeks and published in a couple of months. The name is now: "Challenge: Torah Views on Science and its Problems" (can one detect a very faint echo of Civilization and Its Discontents?). In the end, I had to abridge your article slightly. I (reluctantly) left out most of Abarbanel's pshat on Uziah and some recondite parts of your dissertation on the Nefesh Hachayim. As a result, 55 pages became some 48. I am sure you will be very happy with the result. We have lavished care on the production of the book and it will be first-rate quality.There are 34 articles by some 23 authors and it will run each article to 538 pages. The page facing the commencement and first appearance features linking material, biography of author of article.In spite of the apparent comprehensiveness of your article, it seems to me that there are still important questions that need discussion. There is one aspect you do not touch on in the subject. It looms large in the imaginative literature on this usually succeeding.This is the prospect that the civilization we eventually contact may be immeasurably in advance of our own, and thus in a position to reveal to us the "secrets of the universe" and to direct life on this planet into different and happier channels.It is usually implied in the light of this vast new knowledge that our present ideas about everything, including of course religion, will be shown to be the immature fumblings of unevolved minds.How fare Torah in such a hypothetical situation? It seems all possible existential bases of our emuna might be challenged. We must assume, if meaningful communication is to be at all possible, that the beings forming the exocivilization are in some essential respects analogous to ourselves. This implies that they must have:Consciousness and mind,A physical substra…