Only The Lonely
posted by Tim Walters @ 9:20 PM David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets. A very enjoyable romp through the history, current state, and prospects of astrobiology, completely with highly informal style (there's even a smiley... I'm not sure how I feel about that), humor that's actually funny (read the footnotes!), refreshing humility (not so hard, I guess, when, as he points out, what we actually know about extraterrestrial life can be expressed in one word: nothing), and a couple of entertainingly iconoclastic theories (he thinks that Venus and Io are more likely to have life than Mars, although he admits that they're all long shots). I'll be checking out his previous book, Venus Revealed.
3 Comments:
I suppose a light tone and a light tome are appropriate for a book that delves into an empty mine. I'm not sure I could agree that we know nothing whatsoever. We know very little, but I think the what-if thinking that has been done does help us some. Syllogisms are waiting ready to use once we figure out if the premises are true.
I (and I think Grinspoon) were using "know" in the strong sense. And it is true that all of our predictions are by analogy, and based on a sample of one. Look how weird extrasolar planets turned out to be...
In the looser sense, though, I still think that if one assumes a certain planet and a few basics like carbon or silicon structures, one can derive a few fairly probable predictions, limited in their scope, given those premises. Which is not to say that we would never find things we'd never come close to anticipating.
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