Skip to main content

The Ultimate Interplanetary Travel Guide - Jim Bell **

Not too long ago, NASA brought out a series of spoof ‘space tourism’ posters for various destinations in the Solar System. For people like me, who have watched NASA depressingly fail to send humans to the other planets for decade after decade, it was just another painful twist of the knife. On the other hand, the posters probably have more appeal for younger and less cynical minds, by presenting familiar astronomical objects in a new and engaging way. There may even be scope for a whole book along these lines – and that’s what Jim Bell has attempted here.

 The main thing I learned from it is that my brain is programmed to read either fiction or non-fiction, and can’t handle a 50:50 mix of the two – which is what this book is. It drove me mad –  not least because I could see that the same material, presented as straight non-fiction, could have made a really excellent book. Using the NASA posters as a starting point, he could have enumerated the potential ‘tourist sights’ at each location, describing them as they would look to a human observer up close, and what special equipment or precautions would be necessary. That much is purely factual. The next question is what would need to happen to make such a tourist trip practical – if such-and-such a technology is developed, if such-and-such a social/economic/cultural trend is reversed, etc. By making all those ifs explicit, readers could judge for themselves whether the author is talking sense or not.

 But Bell doesn’t do that. He writes the book as if it’s an actual tourist guide from 200 years in the future, with no distinction between what is real and what is speculation. There are data tables showing hard facts like diameters and surface temperatures, alongside travel times from Earth (e.g. 6 hours to the Moon and a month to Jupiter) that are meaningless without some indication of the technology being assumed. Tourist attractions range from ‘real’ ones (natural features and historic landing sites), through sensible speculations (e.g. ice mines on the Moon and deep-sea research stations on Europa) to completely arbitrary ones (Star Wars style speeder races on Mercury and jazz festivals on Deimos).

 I’m not being overly kind about the book, because this is a popular science website aimed at adult readers and that’s who I’m reviewing it for. In all fairness, however, that’s probably not the author’s target audience. I can see that sci-fi fans with little interest in the ‘boring’ details of real-world science may well love the book. It’s certainly a very attractive package, with full-colour illustrations on every page and no dauntingly long blocks of text to read. It looks, in fact, just like one of those lavish coffee table books you see in The Works just before Christmas each year. I’ll even hazard a prediction of my own at this point. Possibly this Christmas, or failing that Christmas 2019, you’re going to see this book on sale in The Works at a very affordable price. If you happen to be looking for a present for a sci-fi mad youngster, it will be just the thing.


Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

 
Review by Andrew May
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more