‘We Are Not Alone: Why We Have Already Found Extraterrestrial Life’ by Dirk Schulze-Makuch & David Darling
On first glance, this book raised my scientific hackles. ‘Why we have already found extraterrestrial life? What kind of nonsense is this?’ I thought to myself. That attitude remained until I had finished reading the introduction. Misleading title aside (you won’t be astonished to hear that we have not already found extraterrestrial life), Schulze-Makuch and Darling have written a solid astrobiology popular science book. While the authors have a tendency to extrapolate tentative evidence somewhat beyond the realms of rigorous science, and take an extremely optimistic viewpoint when reviewing...
Read More‘Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter’s Ocean Moon’ by Richard Greenberg
Unmasking Europa leads us through the unravelling of the mysteries of this intriguing Jovian moon, written by the expert who helped unlock many of its secrets. Richard Greenberg is a professor of planetary science and lead a team who interpreted the icy landforms and their controversial implications as they were revealed by the Galileo space probe. The landscapes of Europa are magnificently diverse: craters, cracks, ridges, and curious patches of jumbled terrain called chaos, all of which speak of on-going active processes in this moon. Europa seems to be a fervently active place, recycling...
Read More‘Titan from Cassini-Huygens’ by Robert Brown, Jean Pierre Lebreton & Hunter Waite (eds)
The Cassini-Huygens mission has provided an incredible diversity and wealth of information about Titan. This claim is supported by this sizable book that encompasses all the scientific results of the Cassini-Huygens mission with regards to Titan. The immensity of new data and the complexity of this fascinating moon has entitled Titan to its own volume, and the results concerning Saturn and its other moons are contained within a single volume entitled Saturn from Cassini-Huygens [1]. This book aims to encompass the enormity of scientific research that has utilized data accumulated from the...
Read More‘Talking about Life: Conversations on Astrobiology’ by Chris Impey (ed)
Astrobiology is still a young and growing science. For the first time, scientists and philosophers alike are able to chart the development of the field in real-time. Chris Impey’s book, Talking about Life: Conversations on Astrobiology, takes a novel approach to this in seeking the views and professional opinions of scientists intimately associated with astrobiological theory and research, through relaxed and informal conversations. The book features 37 interviews from disparate personalities: from the current president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, to prodigious science fiction writer...
Read More‘Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier’ by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Space Chronicles is a journey from the past to the present of U.S. space exploration, with speculation about what the future may hold for NASA at the end of the Space Shuttle era. It also re-evaluates why space exploration is so important and why it demands our attention more than ever. If all this weren’t enough, it’s also incredibly funny. This book is a collection of interviews, speeches, articles and Tweets written by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, the American Museum of Natural History. The book starts with a prologue about the role of...
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