Review of Lee Billings new book Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars:
The book’s title, Billings says, is a reference to the expected longevity of life on Earth, but his account is less about exoplanets than about the people who make the search for them their lives’ cause — “creatures that, before their sun went dim, might somehow touch the stars.”
We meet luminaries like Frank Drake, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who pioneered the search for radio signals from extraterrestrials more than 50 years ago. Drake is now worried that Earth’s own detectability in this regard has declined with the advent of digital television, a worrisome omen if this is the trend of advanced civilizations.
Reading this book is like peering over Billings’s shoulder. He doesn’t just interview astronomers and geophysicists; he and his subjects ponder the history of the universe over margaritas and one-dollar tacos. They tromp through redwood forests, talking, talking, talking.
Sometimes they even do some science, or at least try. During a trip to Lick Observatory in Northern California to watch Venus crossing the Sun, the computer controlling one astronomer’s telescope goes berserk and he misses the crucial moment when sunlight shining past the edge of Venus can delineate the planet’s atmosphere, a feat astronomers want to accomplish with exoplanets. Venus won’t be transiting again until 2117.
The story may meander at times, but this is the best book I have read about exoplanets, and one of the few whose language approaches the grandeur of a quest that is practically as old as our genes. Billings’s description of the history of the Marcellus shale, the subject of a national debate about fracking, is worth the price of the book by itself.
The book’s title, Billings says, is a reference to the expected longevity of life on Earth, but his account is less about exoplanets than about the people who make the search for them their lives’ cause — “creatures that, before their sun went dim, might somehow touch the stars.”
We meet luminaries like Frank Drake, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who pioneered the search for radio signals from extraterrestrials more than 50 years ago. Drake is now worried that Earth’s own detectability in this regard has declined with the advent of digital television, a worrisome omen if this is the trend of advanced civilizations.
Reading this book is like peering over Billings’s shoulder. He doesn’t just interview astronomers and geophysicists; he and his subjects ponder the history of the universe over margaritas and one-dollar tacos. They tromp through redwood forests, talking, talking, talking.
Sometimes they even do some science, or at least try. During a trip to Lick Observatory in Northern California to watch Venus crossing the Sun, the computer controlling one astronomer’s telescope goes berserk and he misses the crucial moment when sunlight shining past the edge of Venus can delineate the planet’s atmosphere, a feat astronomers want to accomplish with exoplanets. Venus won’t be transiting again until 2117.
The story may meander at times, but this is the best book I have read about exoplanets, and one of the few whose language approaches the grandeur of a quest that is practically as old as our genes. Billings’s description of the history of the Marcellus shale, the subject of a national debate about fracking, is worth the price of the book by itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment