Skip to main content

Alien Earths - Lisa Kaltenegger ****

After an introduction to exoplanets - planets orbiting stars other than the Sun - Alien Earths concentrates on the theory of and the search for life on these planets. Written by astronomy professor Lisa Kaltenegger, who runs the Carl Sagan Institute for the Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell University, it's a gentle guide to one of the most imaginative aspects of astronomy.

A fair amount of the content looks at what makes a habitable planet (which is not always an Earth-like situation), what life is and how we may be able to detect it a great distance. There are some good details here, though I would have appreciated more depth. Given this is such a speculative subject, there is also relatively little questioning of assumptions. For example, there's a description of the gold records sent out on Voyager 1 and 2, with detail of how to put a time interval across to aliens. 'The team [behind the records] solved this problem by using a time constant that any spacefaring civilisation should understand.' This involves the hyperfine transition 'spin flip' of hydrogen - but I've never met a human who could interpret the vague visual supposed to illustrate this, so I'm not sure how any alien could 

Kaltenegger's style is chatty - if anything, for me, it tries too hard in this respect. Each chapter starts with a fairly hefty chunk of supposedly engaging fluff. For example, the first proper chapter begins 'The foam on my Portuguese espresso tastes a little bitter, but I hardly notice. For the past hour, I've been staring at images on my computer screen, a live feed from NASA's recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).' Rather than make me feel warm and fuzzy, this just puts my back up a bit - I really don't care about someone else's coffee. A couple of paragraphs later, when she is watching the launch, we are told 'I kept reminding myself to breathe - in and out, in and out.' I think a little study of biology would suggest that no reminding is necessary with autonomous biological systems. It's just a bit overblown.

The other issue I have is about how speculative much of the theorising about alien life inevitably has to be. I appreciate we can't wait for flying saucers over Washington before we give any serious thought to what's out there, but I prefer my science to be more grounded in evidence. Nonetheless, lots of people do like a good dose of speculation (many science magazines thrive on it), so I appreciate that for others this is great fun.

All in all, Kaltenegger does a good job of making the topic approachable and interesting. It's not really for me (and if I were thinking only for myself I'd give it three stars), but for the right audience it does an excellent job.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more