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Chargement... Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey among the Exoplanets in Search of Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity Animalspar James Trefil
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Is it made of the same stuff as us, on an Earthlike world, or does it have different chemistry on a different kind of planet? These are fascinating questions for any space fan, but they are also frustrating, because we have so little data. At best, we can imagine what might be out there, either thought experiments firmly based in known physics or speculative fiction or some combination of the two. At the outset, Trefil and Summers’ book is an excellent introduction to the basic ideas of the study of astrobiology, explaining what experiments have shown us so far, what scientists are searching for, and the underlying physics and chemistry. The language is very accessible, always emphasizing the questions scientists are asking, how we’ve discovered answers, and how much we still don’t know. When the authors run out of facts and data—and that doesn’t take long, this is astrobiology we’re talking about—it turns speculative, considering several different kinds of exoplanetary environments where life might arise, and the reasons why (or why not) intelligent life could result. I would especially recommend this book to any kid (or adult) who enjoys writing hard science fiction, as inspiration for imagining alien life. ( ) Two scientists (physicist and astronomer -- no biologist) offer a fairly undemanding account of today's best guesses about what life forms on other worlds -- mostly exoplanets and their moons -- might be like. Each of the central chapters details a scenario for a different kind of world -- ice-crusted, iced-over ocean, open-ocean, Earth-like, tidal-locked, rogue (no parent star), and super-Earth. In a chapter on life that is not like us, the authors are hard-put to identify any plausible kind of chemical life that would not be described as "carbon-based molecules operating in water". An interesting chapter on life that is *really* not like us includes speculations about superintelligent and possibly conscious machines. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
"It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring readers on a marvelous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life--unlike anything we have experienced so far--that could exist on planets outside our own solar system. Life could be out there in many forms: on frozen worlds, living in liquid oceans beneath ice and communicating (and even battling) with bubbles; on super-dense planets, where they would have evolved body types capable of dealing with extreme gravity; on tidally locked planets with one side turned eternally toward a star; and even on "rogue worlds," which have no star at all. Yet this is no fictional flight of fancy: the authors take what we know about exoplanets and life on our own world and use that data to hypothesize about how, where, and which sorts of life might develop. Imagined Life is a must-have for anyone wanting to learn how the realities of our universe may turn out to be far stranger than fiction"--Amazon. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)576.839Natural sciences and mathematics Life Sciences, Biology Genetics and evolution Evolution Life 1.0 astrobiologyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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