Got to almost 70% of the audiobook, but I'm sorry - I just could NOT finish this thing. Despite a fascinating-sounding concept (that I hoped would getGot to almost 70% of the audiobook, but I'm sorry - I just could NOT finish this thing. Despite a fascinating-sounding concept (that I hoped would get better when they finally got out of the Solar System and into deep space), this was from start to...well, close-to-finish just WAY too much math and physics, with WAY too little "ooh!" and "ah!"
Simply stunning. Hadfield has the eye of an impressionist and the heart of a poet - as well as a pretty sly sense of humor, (see final photo). AbsolutSimply stunning. Hadfield has the eye of an impressionist and the heart of a poet - as well as a pretty sly sense of humor, (see final photo). Absolutely recommended for absolutely everybody!
[image]
[image]
[image]
[image]
Aside from being a former astronaut, (and fighter pilot, test pilot, engineer and musician), Hadfield has also written a memoir An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, and recently published his second Tom Clancy-esque techno-thriller, The Defector. So all I can say is, cut it out, dude - you're making the rest of us look really bad! _________________________________
(The second photo above shows a bunch of "oxbow lakes," which I'd never heard of before but which are apparently formed when extreme oxbow rivers try to straighten out their courses and so snip off some of the more extreme loops...or something like that. But just bizarre and REALLY cool!...more
Kind of disappointed in this one, but that's more on me than the authors. Both are professors of astronomy and physics, not xenobiologists - but stillKind of disappointed in this one, but that's more on me than the authors. Both are professors of astronomy and physics, not xenobiologists - but still, where are the aliens?
The book focuses on the types of potentially habitable planets out there (a more narrow focus than their earlier, better book Exoplanets: Diamond Worlds, Super Earths, Pulsar Planets, and the New Search for Life beyond Our Solar System), and then how life could potentially evolve there and what type of technology it might develop. So for example, on a planet tidally locked to its star - i.e., same side always facing the star, like the moon faces earth - you'd have a narrow habitable "halo" circling the planet where the sunlit side met the dark side. You'd also have very strong, hot, high-altitude winds blowing from hot to cold side, and very strong surface winds blowing back from cold to hot; and so you'd have creatures that were low to the ground with stronger skeletons or exoskeletons, and technology based on wind power. And that's about it.
Most of the book discusses "life like us," i.e., carbon-based lifeforms. There is then an all-too-brief chapter on "life not like us" - based on silicon, say, or evolving in a liquid other than water, (neither of which the authors believe in, BTW). And then there's a final chapter on "life really not like us," which covers non-organic life (metal- or mineral-based), and artificial intelligent life (either self-evolving or man-made).
So some interesting premises here, but kind of a slog and just none of the way-cool hypothetical alien nonsense I was hoping for.
Final conclusion, for those few people who read my description of the authors' earlier book: Stormy ultimately never pays for the pizza....more
TAKING ONE FOR THE TEAM: I READ THIS SO NO ONE ELSE HAS TO - YOU'RE WELCOME!
Well, this is some crazy, hippy-dippy shit here. Which in a weird way, onTAKING ONE FOR THE TEAM: I READ THIS SO NO ONE ELSE HAS TO - YOU'RE WELCOME!
Well, this is some crazy, hippy-dippy shit here. Which in a weird way, only makes me like Francis Younghusband all the more - not content to rest on his already-considerable accomplishments, he still threw himself into the deep end of the pool here, despite (I'm sure) a lot of those folks closest to him asking "just what the #@$! are you going for here??" If you don't already know who Younghusband was, you probably aren't reading this anyway - but quick summary, he was a late 19th century explorer and player of the Great Game against early Russian expansion, and led the 1904 British Invasion of Tibet…you can learn more from a quick Google or Wiki search, although my favorite brief introduction - if only for the title - is right here: https://www.adventure-journal.com/201...
[image] In later life, Younghusband became a bit of a "mystic" - and with his much later life promotion of such ideals as free love, he has even been called "the first hippie." So yes, a strangely complex individual indeed.
But as to this book: Younghusband starts out on fairly solid and even ahead-of-his-time ground. He makes a reasonably compelling argument for the near certainty of life on other planets, based on then-current advances in astronomy. This certainly isn't "Drake equation"-level analysis, (for that I would direct you to the excellent and similarly long-titled Exoplanets: Diamond Worlds, Super Earths, Pulsar Planets, and the New Search for Life beyond Our Solar System), but not bad for it's time.
However, no sooner does he provide a semi-scientific rationale for the possibility of extra-terrestrial life than he pivots to the below:
From science we gathered that among the thousand million stars, five thousand might be attended by bodies which would form possible abodes for life. From philosophy we gathered that the universe in its essential nature is spiritual, and is driven in creative activity under the direction of the Genius of the Whole. And now we infer that, impelled by this activity, living beings must exist on those five thousand bodies, and that some of those beings must be of a higher order than ourselves. And if only one in a hundred carried beings on the same level as ourselves there would be fifty such bodies. And if only one in a thousand had beings higher than ourselves, there would still be five such bodies.
So we can now proceed on the assumption that there are five planets attendant on five stars - five out of five thousand million stars - which carry beings higher than ourselves. And to learn more about the higher characteristics of the universe, and therefore about its real nature, and from this be able to infer something of the character of these higher beings, we will turn from Science and Philosophy to Poetry and Religion….
…and THEN things get weird. What follows from there reads like the transcript of a pot-filled Berkeley dorm room all-nighter in the mid-60s. The following are just miscellaneous hits from opening the book at random:
Possessed of delicate sense-organs, enabling them to respond to a much wider range than we can of vibrations in the ether, they would be able to discriminate finer shades of colour, and to hear fuller and sweeter sounds…they would be able to find and create more beauty and a richer and fairer music. And therefore we may confidently assume that dance and song occupy much of the lives of the higher beings.
They are more than human-beings. They are world-beings. They feel their membership of the World as a Whole; and are filled with a World-love and a World-loyalty.
Of this Eternal Spirit the same yesterday, today, and for ever, in one star as in every other, the World-Leader would for the time being be the most perfect embodiment.
[image]
Still...all said and done, and looking back from the near-apocalyptic COVID-19/Donald Trump world in which we currently find ourselves, I have to admit that I was charmed by his Victorian innocence and optimism. As we're finding out with Dr. Fauci, maybe we should leave science to the scientists. But there's nothing wrong with believing that it eventually gets better; the world and people will get better; that the trend in spiritual development is towards a higher, more-selfless level of awareness and (gasp!) behavior.
But in the meantime - man, is this one weird book. Thank you, you strange, complex, historical badass!...more
With a title this sexy, one would expect this to get pretty great pretty quick. So it's a bit disappointing that it takes a full 75 pages of backgrounWith a title this sexy, one would expect this to get pretty great pretty quick. So it's a bit disappointing that it takes a full 75 pages of background and history before we get to see our first serious exoplanet.
It's kind of like if you rented a porno (assuming anyone still "rents" porn?), only to have the first half hour not only focus entirely on the delivery of a pizza to some conveniently cash-strapped young lady, but to also go back and show the making of the pizza; the drive from the pizza shop to the "you-think-they'd-have-$20-here-somewhere" McMansion in L.A.; and then finally a mini-documentary on the history of Italian cuisine...
But then finally in Chapter Five we get to the good stuff, and Stormy finally starts paying for her pie.
And was it worth the wait! Diamond volcanoes; ice worlds; water worlds; dinosaur and "pond scum" planets; rogue infrared planets cruising through the interstellar blackness; "Super Earths" and styrofoam planets - mind-blowing stuff, but in these authors' hands all surprisingly believable. I just wish they'd found a bigger publisher who would have blown for some of the awesome artwork that these stories cry out for, (and that you probably get cheap from any wallpaper website):
[image]
Also surprising, despite these way-cool if hypothetical alternate worlds, I personally found the last third of the book - the "search for life" part - the most interesting. Summers and Trefil, (both professors at our "local" George Mason University), present a nice summary of the famous Drake equation, but then update it to reflect our more recent understanding of the number of planets out there and what it might take for intelligent life to arise - all of which results in an unexpectedly lower chance of an impending alien invasion.
[image] (The original Drake equation - any questions?)
They also neatly tie in Occam's razor (so that I now understand the "razor" part of that phrase - it "shaves off" unnecessary complexity); the "Great Silence" as summed up in Fermi's famous "then where are they?" question; and a really nifty concept introduced by another GMU professor called "the Great Filter," which further throws the whole thing up for grabs.*
Alternately exhilarating, depressing, inspiring and unsettling, Exoplanets: DWSEPPATNSFLBOSS" is near-consistently fascinating. I would highly recommend to any of my nerdier friends who are even vaguely into this sort of thing.
* Since you asked, "The Great Filter" posits an additional variable in Drake, that would more-or-less change everything. Examples: if the development of intelligent life required a planet to be far from the galactic center - and thus farther away from other exploding stars - or to have a Jupiter-sized planet running "interference" to prevent frequent meteor strikes, that filter would impact the very beginning of the formula, so that life on other planets might be very rare indeed. However, if the filter came later in the equation, such as a requirement for environment-altering geography resulting in plate tectonics or the occasional ice age, then the galaxy would more likely be full of dinosaur-level planets that never developed more intelligent or technological life forms. And finally, there's the theory arguing that "the Great Filter" remains in our future - i.e., the depressing explanation that we haven't detected any advanced civilizations because when they reach our level [or slightly beyond], they invariably use their technology - or alien equivalent of the Electoral College - to wipe themselves out....more
Another in the excellent "Scientists in the Field" series for young readers - but they are equally informative for adults looking for a basic level ofAnother in the excellent "Scientists in the Field" series for young readers - but they are equally informative for adults looking for a basic level of understanding on a current science topic - with pictures!
Fascinating and timely overview of the New Horizons spacecraft and it's journey to the "dwarf planet" Pluto. And while that original mission was launched in 2006 and made its flyby of Pluto nine years later in 2015, I say "timely" in that New Horizons just last month made its subsequent flyby of the first-ever visited Kuiper Belt object, "Ultima Thule."
First photos of "Ultima Thule" made it look like 2/3's of a snowman; but then just today NASA announced new information that shows it is in fact shaped more like two conjoined pancakes! If I could ever figure out how to attach photos to these damn reviews (apparently it's possible, but hell if I can figure it out), I'd include them here. But since I'm apparently a software simpleton, I'll just add a couple of links so you can see for yourself:
This is the kind of science that gets kids choosing to spend the rest of their lives chasing asteroids or sitting on the bottom of the ocean watching seahorses - great stuff, and I only wish more young people (as well as we old farts) were paying attention to it!...more
Fascinating and entertaining overview of the decision and process to downgrade Pluto from "planet" status, along with all the fallout that ensued. TysFascinating and entertaining overview of the decision and process to downgrade Pluto from "planet" status, along with all the fallout that ensued. Tyson played a key role in this and so is the perfect narrator; and while he sometimes writes as if speaking to a child, if you've ever seen him interviewed that's pretty much how he talks to everyone. In fact, this could probably be called The Idiot's Guide to Pluto, since compared to Tyson, we probably all are.
Interesting to learn that the final decision - to call Pluto a "dwarf planet" - really didn't please anyone. The Plutophiles were still upset that Pluto was no longer one of the nine "real" planets, while most of the scientific community didn't like the inclusion of the word "planet" in any description of Pluto, since the whole point of the exercise was deciding that Pluto was not a planet. The process did, however, result in the first ever true definition of a planet - something I would have thought was around for centuries - which spelled out that a planet must be:
- In orbit around a star, but not in orbit around another planet, (i.e., not a moon) - Large enough for its own force of gravity to shape it into a sphere, (i.e., be round)
By this definition, Pluto would still be a planet - but then so would the asteroid Ceres, as well as the additional TNO (Trans-Neptunian Object) Eris, which is in fact even bigger than Pluto. So using just that definition, we would now have 11 planets, not just 9. The IAU's "Planet Definition Committee" therefore added another criterium, stating that:
- The round object has cleared its orbit of wayward debris
...which thereby eliminated Pluto, Eris and Ceres, since they were all part of either the asteroid or Kyper belts. And with that clause taken into consideration, we are back to 8 planets. In either situation, our choices are now between either a reduced or expanded planetary system - either "My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nachos" or "My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants," (ignoring the fact that since this book's writing, at least two new dwarf planets have been found in the Kuiper belt - Makemake and Haumea - with certainly more to follow). The system that most of us grew up with - the original 9 planet "My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" is no longer an option.
To avoid this argument completely, Tyson suggests that the best solution is to forget about numbering the planets altogether, and stick with the classifications of different object systems in the solar system, which seems to take account of everything: the small, terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars); the asteroid belt; the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus); the Kuiper belt of icy comets (including Pluto); and the Oort Cloud of comets, which reaches a thousand times farther out than Pluto and defines the extreme edges of the solar system. And indeed, this is the system Tyson's Rose Center for Earth and Space (the remodeled Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History - i.e., my favorite museum in the world) has gone with.
This is "popular science" of the best kind; easy to read and understand, so that you come away smarter than when you started, but without having to really strain your brain. And for anyone living anywhere on the U.S. East Coast, this is a great incentivizer to get you planning a trip to New York as soon as possible!...more
Alternated between really enjoying and really being frustrated by this book. It's full of fascinating facts and stories, but at times you've got to woAlternated between really enjoying and really being frustrated by this book. It's full of fascinating facts and stories, but at times you've got to work to find them, (a bit like some Bill Bryson). Sobel is a very good writer, but I ultimately felt she was trying too hard here to give each chapter/planet a theme, some of which worked and some...not so much. So some chapters were plain fascinating, while some were real slogs, (although maybe the planets themselves are like that). Still, I just didn't care about all the mythology she threw in when discussing Mercury, or the music with Saturn, or the endless astrology with Jupiter.
That said, I came away with a huge and fascinating bowlful of fresh trivia with which to impress my friends. Who knew that light created in the heart of the Sun takes a million years to then reach the Sun's surface before escaping into space at "light speed"? Or that the ocean surrounding Earth's first continent Pangaea ("all-Earth") was called Panthalasea ("all-Sea")? Or that there was a fifth ancient element to go with earth, water, air and fire - quintessence, (the stuff of stars)? Or that Uranus was the first planet discovered by an identifiable individual, and so was almost called "Planet Herschel"? Or that Neptune was not discovered by observation, but by mathematical calculation as a necessity in explaining Uranus' actions? Well, now I do!
That last is also one of the two great stories that really needs it's own Remarkable Creatures-like novelization. Two scientists in England and France working in ignorance of each other simultaneously deduced not only the existence of an eighth planet but also it's exact location, through an absolutely stunning work of theoretical genius - in one case, reportedly covering 10,000 sheets of paper with computations!! In fact, the existence of Pluto was similarly postulated and ultimately discovered as it was believed necessary to explain Neptune - although that turned out to be false; they had simply underestimated Neptune's true mass by just one-half of one percent!!
The second truly amazing tale - told here in just three pages - concerns efforts in the mid-1700's to determine "the astronomical unit," i.e., the distance from the Earth to the Sun, which would then allow scientists to calculate the size of the solar system and distances between all the planets. Edmond Halley (of comet fame) posited that the AU could be determined by careful observation of Venus' 1761 and 1769 transits of the Sun from various locations on the planet. A truly multinational effort sent teams across Europe, Africa, India, Russian and Canada in 1760, where they battled hostile armies, monsoons, dysentery, floods and cold to build forts and observatories - only to have their efforts thwarted by just a few hours of cloudy weather. A second effort was mounted in 1768 - launching one of Captain Cook's famous voyages - to completely different locations, and met with greater success, although even utilitizing the best technology of the time, they could only fix the AU at somewhere between 92 and 96 million miles.
Wow - just writing the above caused me to revise my opinion and add another star to my review! Budding authors out there - here are two fantastic tales just waiting to be told, and I can't wait to read them!...more
Thought it was time for something a little more challenging than some of the fiction I've been reading lately, but this might have been pushing it a bThought it was time for something a little more challenging than some of the fiction I've been reading lately, but this might have been pushing it a bit. Fascinating book full of deep ideas and complex science, it was ultimately a bit of a slog. That said, probably THE book to read if you are really, really into SETI....more
(FIRST HERE ARE MY INITIAL THOUGHTS, WRITTEN AT THE HALFWAY POINT ON 23 JAN. HAVE NOW FINISHED, SO SCROLL DOWN FOR THE EXCITING - AND UNBELIEVABLY DEP(FIRST HERE ARE MY INITIAL THOUGHTS, WRITTEN AT THE HALFWAY POINT ON 23 JAN. HAVE NOW FINISHED, SO SCROLL DOWN FOR THE EXCITING - AND UNBELIEVABLY DEPRESSING - CONCLUSION!)
First tried reading this back around 2009, but my little brain overloaded about a quarter in. Still, what I did understand was fascinating, and so I promised to give it another try some day when I was hopefully smarter.
Well, that day is today - and I made it halfway through this time before my brain kerploded! So, yay me - but back to my "to get back to" list for Mr. Berman, at least until I've ice-packed my cerebellum with some stupid fiction.
My own limitations aside, Berman is an excellent science writer, with an appealing sense of humor that ranges from cleverly droll to enjoyably stupid. An example of the first, while discussing the progress from hunter to agriculturalist:
"Homo erectus erected the first blazing fire 500,000 years ago. After burgers went from raw to medium-well, a truly long time elapsed before the next human milestone: the bun."
And a couple examples of the second:
"When hieroglyphics were finally deciphered in the mid-19th century ("Aha! I see! It's snake before stork except after fish!"), the inscription revealed how central the Sun was to daily life."
"French astronomer Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière…failed to arrive in time to observe the transit, thanks to an outbreak of war (and probably delays caused by officials writing his name on passport applications)."
So yeah, you're never more than a page or so away from a welcome if generally childish break from all the hard science. And believe me, some of this science is hard - although Berman certainly does his best to, if not dumb it down, at least make it almost accessible to an idiot like me. Much as Dava Sobel did in her small but wonderful The Planets, Berman provides an excellent if too-short description of the 18th century's race against time to determine the Astronomical Unit; but unlike Sobel, he also manages to explain just why the AU is so important to determining the distance of the planets (and how to someday reach them).
Berman also does a great job introducing a number of important but generally overlooked or forgotten players - always one of my favorite things with any non-fiction (see Alan Moorehead's The White/Blue Nile books, or any of Peter Hopkirk's character-driven Central Asian histories) - who had a much more profound impact on our understanding of the world than most of us realize. Among my favorites:
- The early Greeks Aristarchus - first to write that the Sun was the center of the solar system, and that Earth revolved around it once a year while spinning on its axis - and Erosthenes - first to calculate the size of Earth (without ever leaving Egypt!). However, despite their brilliance, both were soon displaced by the more famous (if more consistently wrong) Ptolemy and his geocentric universe, which became gospel for the next 1700 years…
- Best buds Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen (he of the high school lab burner), who discovered and then developed the field of spectroscopy - which I never understood before, but which is now super awesome...
- Walter and Anne Maunder, whose amazing insights into how sunspot activity is linked to magnetic disturbances on Earth was attacked by the at-that-time-totally-bonkers Lord Kelvin (of earlier absolute zero and transatlantic cable fame), relegating them to the scientific junk pile until their work was rediscovered and promoted in the mid-1900's by Jack Eddy, himself one of the 20th century's most famous and important scientists that you've also probably never heard of.
And that's all just in the first half of the book, which may explain why I need a breather now. But I will definitely get back to it again sooner than I did last time - since Berman at least teases at discussing how a better understanding of the Sun and it's cycles might actually save us from total climate meltdown! So stay tuned!!
(FINAL REVIEW…TWO WEEKS LATER:)
Aaaaand…DONE! Took a two week breather before tackling the final 100+ pages, which were equally good but by the end got WAY darker (no pun intended).
The second half of the book got deeper into the science, which certainly made me smarter, but I miss the colorful characters introduced earlier. I have already impressed my colleagues by explaining how important Vitamin D is and why they should let their kids go out and play in the sun; I also now better understand the physics (vs. the earlier "magic") behind the northern lights, rainbows, color, eclipses, etc. But at the same time, I am now scared to frickin' death by solar flares (although at least I now correctly call them "coronal mass ejections," or CMEs). And most depressing of all, while I hinted above that Berman may offer some hope that the Sun might bail us out on climate change, it turns out I was wrong, and so we are, in fact, all doomed.
CLIMATE CHANGE. You may wonder what this has to do with the Sun - and that's just Berman's point, because the answer is "unfortunately, not much." Three Sun-related factors used to affect weather patterns on Earth - eccentricity, obliquity and precession, (don't worry; there won't be a test). But any effect they once had has long been superseded by "anthropomorphic climate forcing," almost exclusively the result of increased CO2 emissions, (aka, greenhouse gases).
"Anthropomorphic climate forcing (man-made climate change) has now become the biggest player in global heating. If carbon emissions go unchecked, all indicators predict positive feedback loops: melting polar ice creates dark-water oceans that absorb more heat, which melts more ice and more permafrost, which releases more methane, and on it goes until the world is 6°F to 10°F warmer, mostly due to warmer winter lows at middle and high latitudes.
"Climate change will then be irreversible, no matter what we do. Those are conditions out planet has not seen for three million years. The results will be spectacular. Rising sea levels will be the least of them. More prominent will be weather extremes, with violent unaccustomed paroxysms. Most prominent will be biological blights and diseases, as previously cold-hating pathogens spread to tasty new organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms."
Or as Berman sums up just one page later: "we're screwed."
And remember, this book was published in 2011 (and so researched/written at least 2-3 years earlier), and so things have only gotten worse since then.* However, Berman does offer a few ideas on where one might want to move to for one's final days - New England and Eastern Canada might not be bad places to ride out our looming (and increasingly certain) Mad Max eco-tastrophy.
Sigh…
(* One statistic Berman often refers to is the atmospheric CO2 level. Historically, that ranged from a low of 180 ppm (parts/million) during Earth's coldest periods to a high of 280 ppm - but never higher until the mid-20th century. At the time of Berman's writing, he reported a shocking level of 338 ppm, and described the long-term disastrous effects that would have. Well, a quick Google search just informed me that in 2017, the level was already up to 405 ppm - higher than at any other time in the past 800,000 years.)
Loading...
