Other Worlds: The Search for Life in the Universe Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Other Worlds: The Search for Life in the Universe Book

The first planet around a sunlike star was finally detected in 1995, after decades of false alarms. It was inevitable that within a couple of years a flood of books on extrasolar planets would gush forth. Michael Lemonick is the senior science writer at Time magazine, and his account is the most readable and vivid yet. He has a fluid, anecdotal style, with a good ear for the sort of simile that really speaks to the average reader, as when he describes hooking up a radio telescope being like "setting up a new computer yourself. Sometimes it just plain doesn't work, and you can't for the life of you figure out why." Lemonick structures Other Worlds around Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler, whose Extrasolar Planet Search Project at the University of California, San Francisco, is the most successful program so far, with six planet discoveries to its credit by the end of 1998. Lemonick's other touchstone is the Drake Equation, which he hyperbolically calls "the second most important equation of the century." If we could fit in values for the seven terms in this equation, we could say something sensible about the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So far, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has not come up with any actual data, but, as one researcher says, it's "the world's biggest carrot," and worth enduring a considerable number of sticks. --Mary Ellen Curtin Read More

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  • Product Description

    Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? Recent discoveries have made it more likely than ever that we will know the answer to this age-old question in our lifetimes -- and that the answer most likely will be yes. No longer a subject relegated to the fringes, the search for extraterrestrial life is now a mainstream scientific pursuit. In Other Worlds, Michael Lemonick introduces us to the pioneering researchers who are using brand-new technology to explore the universe, looking for elusive signs of life.

    Within recent years, tantalizing suggestions of extraterrestrial life have materialized, including new data from Mars and discoveries about Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Lemonick describes these remarkable breakthroughs, including the very recent discovery that there are more planets outside our solar system than in it -- an idea that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

    Other Worlds takes us inside the observatories, from the world's most powerful telescopes, situated at the top of a volcanic mountain in Hawaii, to the giant radio antennas in a bucolic West Virginia valley, used to listen for alien signals. It is in these places that scientists like Paul Butter and Geoff Marcy analyze the data that led to their discovery of new planets trillions of miles away, and where astronomer Seth Shostak helps run Project Phoenix for the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute. Even NASA has now begun its Origins Program, hoping the search for extraterrestrial life will do for the agency what the mission to put a man on the moon did in the 1960s.

    Michael Lemonick has been called "an inspiring explainer of some of the most mind-expanding ideas in contemporary cosmology" in the Los Angeles Times and "[one of] the best of today's astronomy popularizers" in The New York Times Book Review.

    Lively and anecdotal, Other Worlds is a fascinating look at one of the most compelling areas of scientific research today and the scientists behind it, as well as a thought-provoking reflection on how the search for extraterrestrial life affects the way we regard our place in the universe.

  • 0684853132
  • 9780684853130
  • Michael D. Lemonick
  • 24 May 1999
  • Pocket Books
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 272
  • 1st Touchstone Ed
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