186 Worlds that have never been and that perhaps will be

Recently, some biologists have reconstructed the ideal space of all possible animals and plants: they have called it "morphospace." But why construct this gigantic, seemingly useless metaverse? Because we can compare it with proteins, genomes, and the plants and animals that actually exist and have existed throughout evolution—that is, with reality. They have thus discovered that what we call the real is a small subset of the possible, and that large regions of morphospace are empty. In this talk, Telmo Pievani (Tutti i mondi possibili, Raffaello Cortina) takes us into the vast world of what is not—or is not yet—but, above all, into the amazing world of what we do not know. With him, Andrea Valente.