Worlds Without End
Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home.
Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds without End is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life.
With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what’s behind this accelerating progress, what’s next, and what it might mean for humanity’s future.
The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stimulating survey, Impey (Einstein's Monsters), an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, takes readers on a tour of notable planets beyond our solar system, or exoplanets. He covers the scientific advances and discoveries made since the 1995 identification of the first exoplanet—a body half the mass of Jupiter that circles its star in a "blistering four-day" year—launched a proliferation of research that has led contemporary astronomers to posit that "about 60 percent of sunlike stars have a habitable, earthlike planet." Explaining the sophisticated techniques scientists developed for studying exoplanets, Impey describes how astronomers infer details about atmosphere and chemical composition from the changes undergone by starlight as it passes through an exoplanet's atmosphere on its way to Earth, revealing planets with 5,400 mph winds and temperatures hot enough to vaporize metal. The author also discusses efforts to find life elsewhere in the cosmos, including the European Space Agency's plans to search one of Jupiter's moons and a Russian philanthropist's quest to send nanobots to planets orbiting the star nearest to our sun. Impey strikes the right balance between accessibility and scientific rigor, and the glimpses into the extreme conditions on distant planets will whet readers' curiosity. Armchair astronomers will be entranced.
