Got a very pleasant surprise in this mornings The New York Times! Five Billion Years of Solitude for the win! goo.gl/wI1nFe FIVE BILLION YEARS OF SOLITUDE The Search for Life Among the Stars By Lee Billings 294 pages. Current. $27.95. At one point in this survey of our efforts to find company in the universe and to fend off planetary extinction, an astrophysicist named Greg Laughlin suggests moving Earth out near Mars by using large comets to deflect some of Jupiter’s “orbital energy” over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Ideas like that one will leave readers who aren’t rocket scientists slack-jawed. Mr. Billings writes as accessibly as possible about a field in which careers and reputations are “forged or shattered on the barest probabilistic whiffs of planets emerging from a statistical haze.” The astronomer Frank Drake, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, tells Mr. Billings: “Right now there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room. Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them.” Mr. Billings’s book is a reminder of the incredible strides we’ve made in charting the cosmos, and of how even our most advanced efforts may not be enough to detect and communicate with other life if, in the end, it’s out there.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 14:45:18 +0000
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