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Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own
“Weird indeed, and not a little wonderful.”― Nature In the 1980s and 1990s, in places where no one thought it possible, scientists found organisms they called extremophiles: lovers of extremes. There were bacteria in volcanic hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, single-celled algae in Antarctic ice floes, and fungi in the cooling pools of nuclear reactors. But might there be life stranger than the most extreme extremophile? Might there be, somewhere, another kind of life entirely? In fact, scientists have hypothesized life that uses ammonia instead of water, life based not in carbon but in silicon, life driven by nuclear chemistry, and life whose very atoms are unlike those in life we know. In recent years some scientists have begun to look for the tamer versions of such life on rock surfaces in the American Southwest, in a “shadow biosphere” that might impinge on the known biosphere, and even deep within human tissue. They have also hypothesized more radical versions that might survive in Martian permafrost, in the cold ethylene lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan, and in the hydrogen-rich atmospheres of giant planets in other solar systems. And they have imagined it in places off those worlds: the exotic ices in comets, the vast spaces between the stars, and―strangest of all―parallel universes. Distilling complex science in clear and lively prose, David Toomey illuminates the research of the biological avant-garde and describes the workings of weird organisms in riveting detail. His chapters feature an unforgettable cast of brilliant scientists and cover everything from problems with our definitions of life to the possibility of intelligent weird life. With wit and understanding that will delight scientists and lay readers alike, Toomey reveals how our current knowledge of life forms may account for only a tiny fraction of what’s really out there. 10 illustrations
288 pages, Hardcover
First published February 19, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 90 reviews
January 16, 2023
Fascinating concept but a lot of it has already been gone over at exhaustive length (like some of the chapters discussing possible life is stuff I read as a kid in the 80s). Still if you're new to the discussion about the concept of what defines life and where we will find it and why? This book is a great jumping on point that makes a lot of discoveries and theories from the last hundred years accessible and easier to understand. It might just BLOW YOUR MIND. Or in the very least open up your thinking about how we define life and how the more we encounter it, the more difficult it is to contain it within a set of definitions.
April 7, 2013
“For the moment, then, let’s allow our imaginations free reign.”
Look, I’m as geeky as the next girl. How can you hear the subject matter of this book and not be fascinated? David Toomey opens Weird Life exactly where I would expect—with extremophiles. Extremophiles are some of the most unusual and extraordinary creatures in all of biology. Which makes sense, because life = biology. Right?
That’s what I thought, but clearly that’s due to a massive failure of imagination on my part. One the most impressive things about Toomey’s book are the sheer breadth, depth, and scope of what is covered. Toomey starts with biology—microbiology, exobiology, marine biology, synthetic biology, molecular biology, astrobiology, evolutionary biology. That, friends, is the mere tip of the iceberg. Toomey touches on disciplines and theories including: organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, interstellar chemistry, molecular chemistry, biochemistry, nuclear chemistry, geology, genetics, robotics, computer science, mathematics, theoretical physics, particle physics, quantum physics, astrophysics, string theory, nanotechnology, multiverses, astrology, botany, taxonomy, engineering, ecology, epistemology, psychology, and philosophy. If that’s not enough, there’s even a chapter on weird life in science fiction! This book is thorough, that’s all I’m saying. There’s a reason for this:
“The attentive reader may have noticed that ideas for the weirdest sorts of weird life did not originate with biologists or even, for that matter, with astrobiologists. They came from scholars and practitioners in other fields. The hypotheses of life in other universes were formulated by theoretical physicists (Harnik, Kribs, and Perez; and Jaffe, Jenkins, and Kimchi). Ideas of life in the vicinity of black holes and the atmospheres of white dwarf stars were conceived by astrophysicists (Adams and Laughlin). Hypotheses of life surviving through eternity were developed by a mathematician and theoretical physicist (Dyson), who also supplied us with what may be the broadest definition of life so far. Of the many ideas of weird organisms from science fiction, two that are notably well grounded in science are from a physicist turned aerospace engineer (Forward) and from a professional astronomer (Hoyle). Even the relatively conservative hypothesis of hydrogen-breathing dirigibles was proposed by a physicist (Saltpeter) and a planetary scientist turned astrobiologist (Sagan).”
So… there’s some smart stuff in this book. Do not be intimidated! I’m incredibly uneducated, and I had no difficulty reading Weird Life from cover to cover. My mind was occasionally blown—but always in a good way. And if you need a little reminder on the difference between a mesophile and a methanogen, please be aware that there’s a glossary at the back of the book between the text and the endnotes, but before the very thorough bibliography.
This book covers science that is being done right up to the minute. At least three times a variation on the phrase “as we go to press” was used. This science is emergent and so very, very fascinating. Here’s a good example, arising from our lack of understanding of what comets are made of:
“Being mostly solid bodies, comets resist interferometry. In 2003, it occurred to Allamandola and his colleague Doug Hudgins that there was another way. If they could make a comet from scratch, they could study it. They took a sample chamber called a “cosmic ice simulation chamber,” removed most of its atmosphere, and froze what was left to a temperature near absolute zero, thus making the inside of the chamber a fair representation of deep space. They introduced into the chamber a few simple molecules that might be found in a star’s outflow, and turned on a lamp (representing nearby stars) that bathed the molecules in ultraviolet radiation. Then they waited. They were not expecting much, and they were certainly not expecting what happened. The molecules combined, split, and recombined, and before long the chamber contained some very complex molecules, many of which were prebiotic.”
Is your mind blown? Maybe it’s just me. But I couldn’t put this book down. My only minor disappointment is that there weren’t more photos and illustrations, but I guess it’s hard to fault an author for not including images of hypothetical things that may or may not exist. Toomey did pretty well, all things considered.
Life, in all its colors and flavors, is amazing. Mr. Toomey has reminded me of that fact. This was the most enjoyable science book I have read in quite a few years. My mind and ideas have been expanded, quite painlessly. So let’s, as Mr. Toomey suggests, allow our imaginations free reign.
Look, I’m as geeky as the next girl. How can you hear the subject matter of this book and not be fascinated? David Toomey opens Weird Life exactly where I would expect—with extremophiles. Extremophiles are some of the most unusual and extraordinary creatures in all of biology. Which makes sense, because life = biology. Right?
That’s what I thought, but clearly that’s due to a massive failure of imagination on my part. One the most impressive things about Toomey’s book are the sheer breadth, depth, and scope of what is covered. Toomey starts with biology—microbiology, exobiology, marine biology, synthetic biology, molecular biology, astrobiology, evolutionary biology. That, friends, is the mere tip of the iceberg. Toomey touches on disciplines and theories including: organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, interstellar chemistry, molecular chemistry, biochemistry, nuclear chemistry, geology, genetics, robotics, computer science, mathematics, theoretical physics, particle physics, quantum physics, astrophysics, string theory, nanotechnology, multiverses, astrology, botany, taxonomy, engineering, ecology, epistemology, psychology, and philosophy. If that’s not enough, there’s even a chapter on weird life in science fiction! This book is thorough, that’s all I’m saying. There’s a reason for this:
“The attentive reader may have noticed that ideas for the weirdest sorts of weird life did not originate with biologists or even, for that matter, with astrobiologists. They came from scholars and practitioners in other fields. The hypotheses of life in other universes were formulated by theoretical physicists (Harnik, Kribs, and Perez; and Jaffe, Jenkins, and Kimchi). Ideas of life in the vicinity of black holes and the atmospheres of white dwarf stars were conceived by astrophysicists (Adams and Laughlin). Hypotheses of life surviving through eternity were developed by a mathematician and theoretical physicist (Dyson), who also supplied us with what may be the broadest definition of life so far. Of the many ideas of weird organisms from science fiction, two that are notably well grounded in science are from a physicist turned aerospace engineer (Forward) and from a professional astronomer (Hoyle). Even the relatively conservative hypothesis of hydrogen-breathing dirigibles was proposed by a physicist (Saltpeter) and a planetary scientist turned astrobiologist (Sagan).”
So… there’s some smart stuff in this book. Do not be intimidated! I’m incredibly uneducated, and I had no difficulty reading Weird Life from cover to cover. My mind was occasionally blown—but always in a good way. And if you need a little reminder on the difference between a mesophile and a methanogen, please be aware that there’s a glossary at the back of the book between the text and the endnotes, but before the very thorough bibliography.
This book covers science that is being done right up to the minute. At least three times a variation on the phrase “as we go to press” was used. This science is emergent and so very, very fascinating. Here’s a good example, arising from our lack of understanding of what comets are made of:
“Being mostly solid bodies, comets resist interferometry. In 2003, it occurred to Allamandola and his colleague Doug Hudgins that there was another way. If they could make a comet from scratch, they could study it. They took a sample chamber called a “cosmic ice simulation chamber,” removed most of its atmosphere, and froze what was left to a temperature near absolute zero, thus making the inside of the chamber a fair representation of deep space. They introduced into the chamber a few simple molecules that might be found in a star’s outflow, and turned on a lamp (representing nearby stars) that bathed the molecules in ultraviolet radiation. Then they waited. They were not expecting much, and they were certainly not expecting what happened. The molecules combined, split, and recombined, and before long the chamber contained some very complex molecules, many of which were prebiotic.”
Is your mind blown? Maybe it’s just me. But I couldn’t put this book down. My only minor disappointment is that there weren’t more photos and illustrations, but I guess it’s hard to fault an author for not including images of hypothetical things that may or may not exist. Toomey did pretty well, all things considered.
Life, in all its colors and flavors, is amazing. Mr. Toomey has reminded me of that fact. This was the most enjoyable science book I have read in quite a few years. My mind and ideas have been expanded, quite painlessly. So let’s, as Mr. Toomey suggests, allow our imaginations free reign.
January 12, 2015
"In recent years, scientists at the frontiers of biology have hypothesized the existence of life-forms that can only be called “weird”: organisms that live off acid rather than water, microbes that thrive at temperatures and pressure levels so extreme that their cellular structures should break down, perhaps even organisms that reproduce without DNA. The search for these strange life-forms spans the universe, from rock surfaces in the American southwest and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor to Martian permafrost, the ammonia oceans of Jupiter’s moons, the hydrogen-rich atmospheres of giant planets, the exotic ices on comets, the crusts of neutron stars, and the vast reaches of space itself. David Toomey brings us into the world of the researchers who have devoted their careers to “weird life,” and as they envision and discover ever stranger organisms here on earth, they open up fascinating possibilities for the discovery of life in the rest of the universe."
An interesting little volume, mapping out what to look for with regards to exotic life forms. The search is on, to see if an organism on Earth can be found that doesn't come from the same evolutionary line that has produced all the known plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. There's a strong possibility that in some remote [and awful] part of our Earth, some weird life exists.
Toomey also explores non-Earth locations for weird life, including the rest of our solar system, artificial life, and planets outside our galaxy that include liquids + a source of energy. He really covers all the bases.
There is also some worry that Earth space craft will contaminate other planets with our microbes, something that I just heard a radio interview about last weekend. One scientist is taking a census of the bacteria, fungi, etc. that survive on the objects that we will hurl into space so that we will have some idea of which ones may show up later on Mars, Europa, or wherever. Wouldn't it be dreadful to wipe out the biota of another planet by introducing a pathogenic bacteria?
As far as I could tell, this was a good summary of the available thinking on this field.
An interesting little volume, mapping out what to look for with regards to exotic life forms. The search is on, to see if an organism on Earth can be found that doesn't come from the same evolutionary line that has produced all the known plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. There's a strong possibility that in some remote [and awful] part of our Earth, some weird life exists.
Toomey also explores non-Earth locations for weird life, including the rest of our solar system, artificial life, and planets outside our galaxy that include liquids + a source of energy. He really covers all the bases.
There is also some worry that Earth space craft will contaminate other planets with our microbes, something that I just heard a radio interview about last weekend. One scientist is taking a census of the bacteria, fungi, etc. that survive on the objects that we will hurl into space so that we will have some idea of which ones may show up later on Mars, Europa, or wherever. Wouldn't it be dreadful to wipe out the biota of another planet by introducing a pathogenic bacteria?
As far as I could tell, this was a good summary of the available thinking on this field.
March 15, 2014
I hate it when I really, really want to like a book, and it just doesn't let me. I should have loved this one: it's all about "weird" life that is theoretically distinct from our own, and it talks about everything from the shadow biosphere to SETI and the anthropic principle. This is one of my pet obsessions, and one of the big reasons I read SF in the first place. Exotic life! Alternate forms of intelligence! Alien civilizations!
Except that a book about weird life is, by definition, gonna talk mostly about what we don't know. We haven't found any such thing, even though everyone in the astrobiology community is all excited about Titan and the underground oceans of Europa. The sad fact remains, we haven't found a single microbe on Mars yet, so there's not much to report on.
As a result, the book wanders back and forth between vignettes on the scientists at the forefront of the search for "weird life," explorations of the biochemical principles behind life, and puzzling flights of fancy about the various forms life might take out there in the Universe. This book made me dream a little, but it didn't leave me with any lasting impression. It didn't suggest a venue of hope, nor did it enlighten me about the world of astrobiology.
And so, I must conclude that Weird Life is a big miss on a very dear subject of mine. There's just a certain lack of audacity to this one. There's no deep pondering of what "intelligence" means, no true exploration of the various definitions of Life. The whole thing feels very sketchy, and the book might have benefited from focusing on a specific aspect of its wide topic, whether it's discussions of the shadow biosphere, the search for extremophiles, or the search for life in the Solar System and beyond.
Many parts of the book feel as if the author chose certain points of view carefully to suggest the possibility of weird life to the reader. We mostly get the sides of those who argue that weird life exists, and the whole debate around this very important and fascinating question is never truly broached. The chapter on science fiction depictions of weird life was particularly frustrating. There is no discussion on how science fiction informs science research on the meaning of life; just an enumeration of very random and little-known SF works featuring some alien biology or another.
Which brings me to the core of my gripe with this book: the point it's clumsily trying to make has been explored in much more elegant ways by science fiction. There are great SF books out there that talk about the meaning of intelligence and life, and that will blow your mind much more efficiently than this book. Check out Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, or the amazing Blindsight by Peter Watts. Those books are real trips, and they articulate their points in a much more rigorous and nuanced manner than Weird Life. Weirdly enough.
Except that a book about weird life is, by definition, gonna talk mostly about what we don't know. We haven't found any such thing, even though everyone in the astrobiology community is all excited about Titan and the underground oceans of Europa. The sad fact remains, we haven't found a single microbe on Mars yet, so there's not much to report on.
As a result, the book wanders back and forth between vignettes on the scientists at the forefront of the search for "weird life," explorations of the biochemical principles behind life, and puzzling flights of fancy about the various forms life might take out there in the Universe. This book made me dream a little, but it didn't leave me with any lasting impression. It didn't suggest a venue of hope, nor did it enlighten me about the world of astrobiology.
And so, I must conclude that Weird Life is a big miss on a very dear subject of mine. There's just a certain lack of audacity to this one. There's no deep pondering of what "intelligence" means, no true exploration of the various definitions of Life. The whole thing feels very sketchy, and the book might have benefited from focusing on a specific aspect of its wide topic, whether it's discussions of the shadow biosphere, the search for extremophiles, or the search for life in the Solar System and beyond.
Many parts of the book feel as if the author chose certain points of view carefully to suggest the possibility of weird life to the reader. We mostly get the sides of those who argue that weird life exists, and the whole debate around this very important and fascinating question is never truly broached. The chapter on science fiction depictions of weird life was particularly frustrating. There is no discussion on how science fiction informs science research on the meaning of life; just an enumeration of very random and little-known SF works featuring some alien biology or another.
Which brings me to the core of my gripe with this book: the point it's clumsily trying to make has been explored in much more elegant ways by science fiction. There are great SF books out there that talk about the meaning of intelligence and life, and that will blow your mind much more efficiently than this book. Check out Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, or the amazing Blindsight by Peter Watts. Those books are real trips, and they articulate their points in a much more rigorous and nuanced manner than Weird Life. Weirdly enough.
January 22, 2016
Brian Greene light when I was expecting David Attenborough.
Before I get into why this book wasn't what I thought it was going to be, let me explain what it was. It was a very well-written and concise explanation of the possibility of - and search for - extraterrestrial life. Or, better described, weird life. Life that doesn't even closely resemble any kind of life here. We're talking silicon instead of carbon, methane instead of oxygen, and maybe even two-up quark hydrogens (I know! Getting crazy!)
We start with extremophiles on Earth - deep sea black smokers, hypersaline lakes, and steaming gysers - and I was all jazzed up and smiling while I read. Alvin? Yes. Deep sea vents? Yes. Ice algae? YES!
But we quickly leave the comforts of home for discussions of Saturns moons, red dwarf stars, advanced organic chemistry, quarks, and multiverse string theory. Oh, and SETI. Which makes me think of the movie Contact. Which makes me think of Carl Sagan....and Matthew McConaughey. Both pluses.
Toomey walks us through the what, where, when, why, and how of current scientific thought on probable weird life. Some of the facts are truly astonishing and my mind is always blown when I try and wrap my brain around the extent of our universe.
But, it wasn't what I was expecting at all. I don't know why, but I was expecting a biology book. Weird life here on Earth and how it freaking rocks while David Attenborough's British accent echoed in my mind. Instead what I got was Brian Greene with two Splenda's and splash of nonfat milk to make it go down smoother. And I think Greene is a-maz-ing. But when I want to read about complex physics, I will pick up Greene and commit myself to pencil, paper, and abacus.
This book massively suffered due to my own misguided expectation. And my (quite honest) lack of interest in the search for extraterrestrial life. I love astronomy. I love physics. Astrophysics is a double bonus. But, theoretical explorations of the chemical and physical likelihoods of evolving life on every planet, moon, and comet is not my favorite topic.
So, while the book was interesting overall and the first chapter had me literally drooling with excitement, it took a downturn when I realized that it was not what I thought it was. It suffered from unrealistic expectations.
In related news, that last part could describe every relationship I have ever been in.....so maybe it is more biology than I thought! lol.
Before I get into why this book wasn't what I thought it was going to be, let me explain what it was. It was a very well-written and concise explanation of the possibility of - and search for - extraterrestrial life. Or, better described, weird life. Life that doesn't even closely resemble any kind of life here. We're talking silicon instead of carbon, methane instead of oxygen, and maybe even two-up quark hydrogens (I know! Getting crazy!)
We start with extremophiles on Earth - deep sea black smokers, hypersaline lakes, and steaming gysers - and I was all jazzed up and smiling while I read. Alvin? Yes. Deep sea vents? Yes. Ice algae? YES!
But we quickly leave the comforts of home for discussions of Saturns moons, red dwarf stars, advanced organic chemistry, quarks, and multiverse string theory. Oh, and SETI. Which makes me think of the movie Contact. Which makes me think of Carl Sagan....and Matthew McConaughey. Both pluses.
Toomey walks us through the what, where, when, why, and how of current scientific thought on probable weird life. Some of the facts are truly astonishing and my mind is always blown when I try and wrap my brain around the extent of our universe.
But, it wasn't what I was expecting at all. I don't know why, but I was expecting a biology book. Weird life here on Earth and how it freaking rocks while David Attenborough's British accent echoed in my mind. Instead what I got was Brian Greene with two Splenda's and splash of nonfat milk to make it go down smoother. And I think Greene is a-maz-ing. But when I want to read about complex physics, I will pick up Greene and commit myself to pencil, paper, and abacus.
This book massively suffered due to my own misguided expectation. And my (quite honest) lack of interest in the search for extraterrestrial life. I love astronomy. I love physics. Astrophysics is a double bonus. But, theoretical explorations of the chemical and physical likelihoods of evolving life on every planet, moon, and comet is not my favorite topic.
So, while the book was interesting overall and the first chapter had me literally drooling with excitement, it took a downturn when I realized that it was not what I thought it was. It suffered from unrealistic expectations.
In related news, that last part could describe every relationship I have ever been in.....so maybe it is more biology than I thought! lol.
September 7, 2025
The premise of this book is that there's a possibility of life, not as we know it, and the ways and places that it's being searched for. It goes from the extreme edges of life as we're familiar with it: extremophiles and archaea, through to life based around different basic elements, life in other places in the solar system and then through to some extremely wild speculation about multiple dimensions and simulations.
First the few really good things about this book: if you're unaware of the candidates for biological life in our solar system off Earth, this book gives a good summary of those. It's also got one of the better descriptions and discussions of the anthropic principle in physics that I've seen.
One of my personal bugbears is when a reviewer complains that the book isn't the book they wanted, and proceeds to judge the book in terms of the book they wished it was. Indulge me a little, because I'm going to do that a bit. What I was looking for in this book is much more about the edges of known life, with more information on how extremophiles work, how archaea differ from other life and much more on the science of these edges. The speculative stuff is fine, but I wanted the real science to outweigh the imaginative musings, rather than what we actually have.
Another thing that really annoyed me about this is just how credulous it is. It presents the "arsenic life" research into the GFAJ-1 organism in a positive way, right up until it barely mentions that the research is hugely disputed, has never been replicated and the original paper, already controversial, has been retracted. Or the work on the ALH84001 martian meteorite that some researchers (again, controversially) claimed contained fossils of nano-bacteria. The book spends some time on explaining the idea, explaining the evidence and barely mentions that it's all been discredited since. If the science made outrageous claims, and the claims have since been found to be outrageous, why even mention them?
And then there's a comment late in the book that a lot of the wilder ideas about possible weird life aren't actually coming from biologists at all; they're from physicists and philosophers among others. I really wanted this author to refer to Dunning–Kruger effect at this point as a very likely explanation for this, but again, he's far too credulous for that.
Disappointing.
First the few really good things about this book: if you're unaware of the candidates for biological life in our solar system off Earth, this book gives a good summary of those. It's also got one of the better descriptions and discussions of the anthropic principle in physics that I've seen.
One of my personal bugbears is when a reviewer complains that the book isn't the book they wanted, and proceeds to judge the book in terms of the book they wished it was. Indulge me a little, because I'm going to do that a bit. What I was looking for in this book is much more about the edges of known life, with more information on how extremophiles work, how archaea differ from other life and much more on the science of these edges. The speculative stuff is fine, but I wanted the real science to outweigh the imaginative musings, rather than what we actually have.
Another thing that really annoyed me about this is just how credulous it is. It presents the "arsenic life" research into the GFAJ-1 organism in a positive way, right up until it barely mentions that the research is hugely disputed, has never been replicated and the original paper, already controversial, has been retracted. Or the work on the ALH84001 martian meteorite that some researchers (again, controversially) claimed contained fossils of nano-bacteria. The book spends some time on explaining the idea, explaining the evidence and barely mentions that it's all been discredited since. If the science made outrageous claims, and the claims have since been found to be outrageous, why even mention them?
And then there's a comment late in the book that a lot of the wilder ideas about possible weird life aren't actually coming from biologists at all; they're from physicists and philosophers among others. I really wanted this author to refer to Dunning–Kruger effect at this point as a very likely explanation for this, but again, he's far too credulous for that.
Disappointing.
March 17, 2016
Here's the thing; if you're a bit of a science nerd, you're going to love this book. If you're not, you probably won't. The good news is that Toomey is an outstanding writer, making detailed concepts of theoretical physics, astrobiology, chemistry and other hard sciences understandable for a general audience. If you like to play with the What Ifs and How Comes of some of life's big questions, you'll enjoy Weird Life very much. Starting with the "weird life" we know about - the creatures that live in places they shouldn't, like frozen ammonia and the lightless, high pressure bottom of the deepest trench in the ocean floor, then moving out to what life might be found on other planets, in other galaxies, Toomey opens a door for the reader to see into some of the more interesting, innovative and important thoughts in play in the world of theoretical and applied science today. A little funny in spots, a little scary in others, but fascinating from start to finish, I recommend it for everyone the least bit interested in, literally, life, the universe and everything.
May 2, 2020
This book was just what I was hoping it would be - thought-provoking and full of things that I didn't already know. This is not a fanciful book about bug-eyed monsters from outer space; it's mostly about chemistry and biology and planetary geology.
I was amazed at the enormous potential for life at very, very, very cold temperatures and high pressures. He starts with Earthly extremophiles to show just how peculiar life can be on our own planet, and then defines "weird life" as having different chemistry altogether. He describes what energy sources and gradients some alien ecosystems might be based on and then shows how and where we might find them in our own solar system.
I was amazed at the enormous potential for life at very, very, very cold temperatures and high pressures. He starts with Earthly extremophiles to show just how peculiar life can be on our own planet, and then defines "weird life" as having different chemistry altogether. He describes what energy sources and gradients some alien ecosystems might be based on and then shows how and where we might find them in our own solar system.
February 23, 2020
A good read, especially for scientists. It stresses the need for different scientific disciplines to understand each other, in order to better discover what the very limits of possibility within each discipline are. In this case, poking at the limits of life makes for an interesting read. It can be a bit dry and speculative, but when you define weird life as something that hasn’t even been proven to exist yet, there’s only so much you can do.
May 21, 2018
The mystery of the origins of life is one that I have been trying to wrap my head around for many years. We've learned in biology class that all life on earth originated from a single ancestor that existed billions of years ago. All known lifeforms today are similar on a molecular level (DNA), and this suggests a common origin. This explanation always left me with plenty of questions. Was the transition to life from non-living matter just that one time, one place occurrence, or have there been multiple abiogenesis events? I find it hard to accept that life emerged so soon after conditions for it were right (almost immediately after the earth's crust solidified) and never again afterwards. But if there was a second abiogenesis that gave birth to other forms of life, why haven't we found evidence of it?
So I was happy to find this book, hoping that it would shine some light on this mystery. Toomey describes "weird life" mainly in terms of what it's not: it's life that took a different evolutionary path, originated from a different ancestor, resulting in organisms that are fundamentally different from those we know. He takes us on a quest through the universe to find this weird life: to planets and moons in our solar system and to places beyond. For me, the first few chapters that deal with "weird life" here on Earth were the most interesting.
To the question why we haven't found any evidence of life that does not originate from our last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the book offers a few explanations.
Even if it originated from a different ancestor, argues Toomey, this weird life may have grown so similar to life as we know it that it has become indistinguishable. Organisms that have evolved along entirely different evolutionary lines have developed eyesight in a surprisingly similar manner. Toomey mentions the eyes of octopi as an example, which developed independently from the eyes of us vertebrates, and yet seem so similar. Because of this tendency of different evolutionary lines to converge, we may not be able to identify weird life when we see it.
Another reason why we haven't found it yet is because it could be very small. The cells of living organisms have to be of a certain size, the lower limit being set by ribosomes, the relatively large molecules of proteins that work inside all cells to link amino acids and make new proteins. So when we find traces of organisms of just a few nanometers across, it isn't even recognised as life. Nanoparticles, says Toomey, fall into a disciplinary no-man’s-land between chemistry and biology.
And the more I read in Weird Life, the more I realise how much we don't know. There's something called desert varnish, a thin, shiny coating on rocks that Charles Darwin found on the shores near San Salvador. It has been found elsewhere, too, but nobody has been able to establish what kind of organic material it consists of, or whether it's alive at all.
Desert varnish is a candidate for weird life
There could be life on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, or on Jupiter's moon Europa. Or perhaps on comets and asteroids, or even, Toomey speculates, on stars. But so far, our little blue planet is the only place we know of that is able to support life, and it's all DNA based, apparently from that same original ancestor we all have in common. Toomey admits in the Epilogue that no one has discovered an example of weird life, and that it’s possible that no one ever will. This book, then, is a little something to whet our curiosity, an invitation to look further, to go out and explore. Just don't expect to find many answers here.
So I was happy to find this book, hoping that it would shine some light on this mystery. Toomey describes "weird life" mainly in terms of what it's not: it's life that took a different evolutionary path, originated from a different ancestor, resulting in organisms that are fundamentally different from those we know. He takes us on a quest through the universe to find this weird life: to planets and moons in our solar system and to places beyond. For me, the first few chapters that deal with "weird life" here on Earth were the most interesting.
To the question why we haven't found any evidence of life that does not originate from our last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the book offers a few explanations.
Even if it originated from a different ancestor, argues Toomey, this weird life may have grown so similar to life as we know it that it has become indistinguishable. Organisms that have evolved along entirely different evolutionary lines have developed eyesight in a surprisingly similar manner. Toomey mentions the eyes of octopi as an example, which developed independently from the eyes of us vertebrates, and yet seem so similar. Because of this tendency of different evolutionary lines to converge, we may not be able to identify weird life when we see it.
Another reason why we haven't found it yet is because it could be very small. The cells of living organisms have to be of a certain size, the lower limit being set by ribosomes, the relatively large molecules of proteins that work inside all cells to link amino acids and make new proteins. So when we find traces of organisms of just a few nanometers across, it isn't even recognised as life. Nanoparticles, says Toomey, fall into a disciplinary no-man’s-land between chemistry and biology.
And the more I read in Weird Life, the more I realise how much we don't know. There's something called desert varnish, a thin, shiny coating on rocks that Charles Darwin found on the shores near San Salvador. It has been found elsewhere, too, but nobody has been able to establish what kind of organic material it consists of, or whether it's alive at all.
Desert varnish is a candidate for weird life
There could be life on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, or on Jupiter's moon Europa. Or perhaps on comets and asteroids, or even, Toomey speculates, on stars. But so far, our little blue planet is the only place we know of that is able to support life, and it's all DNA based, apparently from that same original ancestor we all have in common. Toomey admits in the Epilogue that no one has discovered an example of weird life, and that it’s possible that no one ever will. This book, then, is a little something to whet our curiosity, an invitation to look further, to go out and explore. Just don't expect to find many answers here.
October 8, 2013
Books are fascinating windows into people. Take Weird Life, for example. The author is interested in the biology and physics, and in presenting a bunch of ideas, not tearing them down. On the Myers-Briggs J vs. P metric this book is clearly a Perceiving "P" not a Judging "J." This has an important place in the ecosystem of scientific information, and it was a very entertaining book in its sheer diversity of ideas.
In this book, David Toomey describes all forms of life in the weirdest settings possible. He essentially starts with the tube worms at hydrothermal vents, which seem as weird as it gets, but wait, it gets weirder from there. At the same time, the book ventures out away from biology and toward physics, when usually you start with the physics. It becomes more and more speculative and (to this biochemist) less and less relevant as it goes on. Toomey deserves a lot of credit for describing some weird physics very well, like certain aspects of multiverse theory, better than any other book I've read. The biochemistry, on the other hand, is something I'd want much more of, but is not part of this book, reasonably so. Pretty much, this book starts with fascinating biological observations and then jumps to multiverse physics without much of the chemistry inbetween, at least at the level I would like. So I am happy to provide the chemist's perspective on this some day, I'm sure!
Weird Life does a nice job of cataloguing the biology and physics. I think I could be a lot more critical of some of the weird ideas here, and I found a few inaccuracies, but that's not really the point of a book like this. This book is a list of possibilities, and who knows, maybe some of them work. I hold out more hope for the first half of the book "working" than the second half, which gets into infinity paradoxes that, as a chemist, I think are closer to sophistry than to convincing arguments. But that's just one chapter at the end. This book is worth a read just for the discussion of Titan, that too is done better than any other treatment I've seen. Makes me want to go there, right now, where's the bus?
This was a fun book and enjoyable. Let's hope there's more material for another Weird Life book in a decade or two.
In this book, David Toomey describes all forms of life in the weirdest settings possible. He essentially starts with the tube worms at hydrothermal vents, which seem as weird as it gets, but wait, it gets weirder from there. At the same time, the book ventures out away from biology and toward physics, when usually you start with the physics. It becomes more and more speculative and (to this biochemist) less and less relevant as it goes on. Toomey deserves a lot of credit for describing some weird physics very well, like certain aspects of multiverse theory, better than any other book I've read. The biochemistry, on the other hand, is something I'd want much more of, but is not part of this book, reasonably so. Pretty much, this book starts with fascinating biological observations and then jumps to multiverse physics without much of the chemistry inbetween, at least at the level I would like. So I am happy to provide the chemist's perspective on this some day, I'm sure!
Weird Life does a nice job of cataloguing the biology and physics. I think I could be a lot more critical of some of the weird ideas here, and I found a few inaccuracies, but that's not really the point of a book like this. This book is a list of possibilities, and who knows, maybe some of them work. I hold out more hope for the first half of the book "working" than the second half, which gets into infinity paradoxes that, as a chemist, I think are closer to sophistry than to convincing arguments. But that's just one chapter at the end. This book is worth a read just for the discussion of Titan, that too is done better than any other treatment I've seen. Makes me want to go there, right now, where's the bus?
This was a fun book and enjoyable. Let's hope there's more material for another Weird Life book in a decade or two.
March 27, 2013
Would probably rank this between a 3 and a 4, but honestly any well-organized, mostly interesting book that teaches me something new gets at least a 4.
I'm a biology teacher so I did enjoy the earlier chapters on the definitions of life and odd biochemistry the most interesting. Some of the weird life on our own planet surprised me and I found it very intriguing.
Later in the book, the author delves into astronomy and astrobiology. Here, the author would have benefited from adding pictures and diagrams of life on other planets. It could start with a hypothetical picture, location, metabolism, waste, and possible biosolvent. That would have clarified the concepts enormously. The science fiction chapter was pretty fun.
I'll admit I had to slog through the last chapter which was a detour into quantum physics and multi-verses. Some of it was interesting, but considering they were the most hypothetical and the chapter was fairly long, it could have used some editing.
Overall, the book was neat and taught me a lot. It might have benefited from different formatting, but altogether it was worthwhile.
I'm a biology teacher so I did enjoy the earlier chapters on the definitions of life and odd biochemistry the most interesting. Some of the weird life on our own planet surprised me and I found it very intriguing.
Later in the book, the author delves into astronomy and astrobiology. Here, the author would have benefited from adding pictures and diagrams of life on other planets. It could start with a hypothetical picture, location, metabolism, waste, and possible biosolvent. That would have clarified the concepts enormously. The science fiction chapter was pretty fun.
I'll admit I had to slog through the last chapter which was a detour into quantum physics and multi-verses. Some of it was interesting, but considering they were the most hypothetical and the chapter was fairly long, it could have used some editing.
Overall, the book was neat and taught me a lot. It might have benefited from different formatting, but altogether it was worthwhile.
July 2, 2013
I thought this book was going to be along the lines of Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex, an exploration of the weird life like those extremophiles living in those crazy sea vents. So I picked it up and started reading and then I realized that it was supposed to be a history of the scientific discovery of the weird organisms like those extremophiles.
Then i finished the second chapter and realized it wasn't that either. This is my biggest problem with the book, that it didn't seem cohesive and focused. Somewhere around chapter 3, it became more about how scientists have theorized different forms of life, but not in a very compelling way full of anecdotes about the scientist behind the theory or in a call to action kind of way, urging you to think of different ways life has come and could come to be.
There are some flashes of an engaging and fun style here and there that tells me that David Toomey could be a great science communicator, but overall I was bored and confused and wishing this book was something other than what it was, never a good sign.
Then i finished the second chapter and realized it wasn't that either. This is my biggest problem with the book, that it didn't seem cohesive and focused. Somewhere around chapter 3, it became more about how scientists have theorized different forms of life, but not in a very compelling way full of anecdotes about the scientist behind the theory or in a call to action kind of way, urging you to think of different ways life has come and could come to be.
There are some flashes of an engaging and fun style here and there that tells me that David Toomey could be a great science communicator, but overall I was bored and confused and wishing this book was something other than what it was, never a good sign.
December 3, 2015
All known life on earth has essentially the same base biochemistry -- proteins are built out of amino acids by ribosomes, based on genetic instructions stored as DNA in a specific code. There's enough arbitrariness in the code that it we are basically certain all known life had a universal common ancestor. This book discusses life that does not come from that ancestry. This includes extraterrestrial life, but also the possibility of a shadow biosphere on earth, the possibility of life not based on biology at all, and other, even more speculative possibilities.
The book is clear and well written, with a good apparatus of notes. However, there are places where the author's lack of technical background shows. On page 135, he says "white dwarf atmosphere gain what heat they have by collision with particles of dark matter" -- a claim I'm pretty sure is nonsense. Also, it's a bit rambly -- I enjoyed each of the chapters but they are more in the nature of a set of linked essays than a really coherent overarching narrative.
The book is clear and well written, with a good apparatus of notes. However, there are places where the author's lack of technical background shows. On page 135, he says "white dwarf atmosphere gain what heat they have by collision with particles of dark matter" -- a claim I'm pretty sure is nonsense. Also, it's a bit rambly -- I enjoyed each of the chapters but they are more in the nature of a set of linked essays than a really coherent overarching narrative.
November 8, 2018
This book is not at all what I was expecting when I started to read it. The title is a little misleading because I was expecting to read something about known weird life like extremophiles (which it does discuss) and other strange creatures. However, it goes into far more areas of discussion than that and is much more interesting because of it. From trying to define life (which we can't really do) to how life could actually start and the ingredients needed, even a little bit of physics and cosmology and going so far as to include a little science fiction. A very entertaining and wildly wide ranging discussion of anything related to life makes this an excellent read.
December 6, 2013
Acho peguei este livro pra ler com expectativas erradas. Achei que fosse discutir os aspectos biológicos de organismos que poderiam existir. O que li foi especulação em cima de especulação. Forte. De como seriam organismos completamente inviáveis a uma viagem louca sobre universos paralelos e outras dimensões físicas. Pode ser o livro certo pra pessoa errada, mas só terminei de ler por muita persistência.
March 28, 2014
Enjoyed the walk into the weird life and what really constitutes weird. Enjoyed the examples of looking at life on other planets and the forms they could take contradictory to our own. Best one was the example of cloud based life that someone wrote a book on.
April 9, 2014
Loved everything about this book. Going into it, I knew nothing about bacteria, single-celled algae, and extremophiles. Interesting, and insightful on where life might exist on earth and on other worlds.
July 26, 2014
I read this book in two sittings, about 4 months apart, so it may not be the most accurate recollection.
Writing style and accessibility:
The first thing to say about Toomey's writing is that it's clear and concise, while being colorful and imaginative enough to keep you turning the pages. Couple that with the interesting (to me) subject matter, and it was easy to burn through this book when I had the time to sit down and do so. It wasn't too demanding of prior knowledge, and with only a high school level of chemistry, biology and astronomy I was able to get through the book without too much sidetracking into Wikipedia articles and the like.
What I wanted to get out of the book:
I'm not a scientist and approached this book more from the perspective of an amateur sci-fi writer, so the things I wanted to get out of it were perhaps different than other potential readers. I wanted to be inspired by ideas that had some basis in science. I wanted to also be able to draw on the knowledge in the book to build sci-fi worlds and characters that were more accurate than the usual depiction of "aliens" in sci-fi. From my perspective, the book provided a fascinating scientific grounding for science fiction ideas. There was even a chapter dedicated to portrayals of weird life in science fiction, which I appreciated.
However...
That chapter - which was perhaps the most important one to me - felt like his weakest. He skimmed only a few fictional works and assessed them only in a very superficial way. I felt like much more could have been said in the way of advice for authors who want to tackle the job of writing about alien life. That said, the rest of the book provides a solid grounding in current (and historical) scientifically accurate thinking about weird life, and so it implicitly advises potential writers about good ways to proceed. I found that I drew more writing ideas and inspiration from the rest of the book than the chapter specifically dedicated to sci-fi writing!
The opening - Extremophiles, normal life, and life on other planets:
The chapters progress in a clear and logical manner. Toomey starts with the most familiar and concrete kind of weird life: the organisms we already know exist on Earth. These are the extremophiles and include organisms that live near super-heated hydro-thermal vents under the ocean, in the mesosphere high above the planet's surface, in alkali lakes, volcanic magma and so on. Although not weird life themselves, they are sufficiently different from regular organisms that they can provide a good gateway into hypotheses about what true weird life might be like.
From there, he talks about definitions of regular life, and what constitutes "normal" life. This is an important part and I appreciate his efforts in defining the normal standard, because it serves as an important tool when we start to imagine what weird life might be like. As an example, he establishes that normal life is carbon-based, uses water as a resource, and developed/evolved in an environment rich with oxygen. With these definitions in mind, it's easier to understand how exactly silicon-based life is fundamentally different and "weird", by comparison, or how organisms that lived in methane-rich environments might be very different from our own.
As the book progresses, we eventually leave Earth and start to consider life on very different planets both within our solar system and even further abroad. He looks at the possibilities for life on the surfaces of very hot and very cold planets, on planets with different chemicals available for biological metabolism, and even above and below the surfaces (deep in the planet's crust, or high above in the atmosphere where the conditions for life may be possible). All throughout, Toomey injects the theories with examples found on Earth that are not so different, and in doing so provides a solid basis for the speculation. Similarly, he often provides some background to each idea and the scientist who proposed it, which helps again to ground the theories in some reality. You get the impression as you go along that even though much of the subject matter is speculative, it is all based in well-established science.
The end chapters - Simulated life, machine life, SETI, sci-fi, and parallel universes:
The final chapters dramatically widen the scope of the book and show the breadth of Toomey's thinking on weird life. They are perhaps some of the more intriguing and "out there" chapters, since they are decidedly much further out on the speculative branch of the tree and look much further into the future, or into the cosmos, than previous theories.
His discussions on simulated and machine life are particularly good and I think he is to be commended for the way he handled this part of the book. Having spent the previous hundred of so pages talking about strictly biological life, he provides an interest twist by opening up the possibility (perhaps the inevitability) of machine-based life - what we'd call A.I. In a theory that borrows heavily from futurist Ray Kurzwil, Toomey discusses the trend in human history towards machine-based systems and the seeming inevitability that at some point in the future we will no longer be biological creatures and instead become machines.
In a chapter that deals with SETI and its own takes on weird, extraterrestrial life, he talks about the concept of machine life and lays out the case for it being highly probable that if SETI does hear from some aliens in the sky, they will not be biological. He does this by pointing out to the grand scale of cosmic evolution. It took billions of years for planets to form, and only a fraction of that time for intelligent life to evolve on them. It is therefore unlikely that two intelligent civilizations would both evolve at the same time, in order to send each other messages (the kind that SETI would receive). It therefore stands to reason that any civilization still out there and transmitting messages would be highly advanced, and non-biological.
In all of this fascinating conjecture, it's clear that Toomey's speculations about weird life is much grander in scope than just what a silicon-based life form might be like. His broad view is commendable, and at its best, absolutely engrossing to think about.
Having not quite fully exploded the scope, however, he turns one of his final chapters to weirder life still: that which might exist in parallel universes. Although some of this conjecture comes off the rails a little bit, I still found the core ideas quite fascinating. Toomey has to do quite a bit of explanatory legwork in this chapter to first explain the basic ideas behind parallel universes. With a basic framework established, he then proceeds to imagine in very broad strokes, what life might be like in universes where things are different in the most fundamental of ways.
As an example, he begins by pointing out something we assume essential for life in our universe - we often say that if a proton had a slightly different weight, life here would be impossible. He then shows that current science has hypothesized a universe where protons with slightly increased weight would still be possible. They wouldn't be able to synthesize the organic compounds we consider essential for life, but they would be able to create other compounds that could, feasibly, serve as the basis for an alien biology.
Another example is even more extreme. Even if planets and suns couldn't form in a given universe, the argument goes, there is still the potential for life that exists in the interstellar medium, in dust clouds of enormous size that contain countless tiny dust grains, each with small amounts of chemicals clinging to them. Collectively these can form a kind of drifting, floating bio-chemical cloud in which evolution could occur and intelligence may even arise. Without suns for energy, they would look elsewhere (and the book previously provides many examples of organisms happily drawing energy from very unexpected sources).
By the time I'd turned the last page, my ideas of "weird life" had well and truly expanded! For that the book has been tremendously valuable.
Conclusion:
I've no doubt left things out, and my review is a bit scatter-shot, but hopefully it paints a picture of the scope of discussion in this book, if nothing else. I think that's Toomey's real strength here. He manages to drill into a substantial level of detail at each point, and yet still had ample room to keep expanding the discussion outward until we are well and truly in the domain of the weirdest life imaginable. If you're looking to expand your thinking about life, and if you have an interest in space and cosmology, this book will likely give you plenty to think about and be inspired by.
Writing style and accessibility:
The first thing to say about Toomey's writing is that it's clear and concise, while being colorful and imaginative enough to keep you turning the pages. Couple that with the interesting (to me) subject matter, and it was easy to burn through this book when I had the time to sit down and do so. It wasn't too demanding of prior knowledge, and with only a high school level of chemistry, biology and astronomy I was able to get through the book without too much sidetracking into Wikipedia articles and the like.
What I wanted to get out of the book:
I'm not a scientist and approached this book more from the perspective of an amateur sci-fi writer, so the things I wanted to get out of it were perhaps different than other potential readers. I wanted to be inspired by ideas that had some basis in science. I wanted to also be able to draw on the knowledge in the book to build sci-fi worlds and characters that were more accurate than the usual depiction of "aliens" in sci-fi. From my perspective, the book provided a fascinating scientific grounding for science fiction ideas. There was even a chapter dedicated to portrayals of weird life in science fiction, which I appreciated.
However...
That chapter - which was perhaps the most important one to me - felt like his weakest. He skimmed only a few fictional works and assessed them only in a very superficial way. I felt like much more could have been said in the way of advice for authors who want to tackle the job of writing about alien life. That said, the rest of the book provides a solid grounding in current (and historical) scientifically accurate thinking about weird life, and so it implicitly advises potential writers about good ways to proceed. I found that I drew more writing ideas and inspiration from the rest of the book than the chapter specifically dedicated to sci-fi writing!
The opening - Extremophiles, normal life, and life on other planets:
The chapters progress in a clear and logical manner. Toomey starts with the most familiar and concrete kind of weird life: the organisms we already know exist on Earth. These are the extremophiles and include organisms that live near super-heated hydro-thermal vents under the ocean, in the mesosphere high above the planet's surface, in alkali lakes, volcanic magma and so on. Although not weird life themselves, they are sufficiently different from regular organisms that they can provide a good gateway into hypotheses about what true weird life might be like.
From there, he talks about definitions of regular life, and what constitutes "normal" life. This is an important part and I appreciate his efforts in defining the normal standard, because it serves as an important tool when we start to imagine what weird life might be like. As an example, he establishes that normal life is carbon-based, uses water as a resource, and developed/evolved in an environment rich with oxygen. With these definitions in mind, it's easier to understand how exactly silicon-based life is fundamentally different and "weird", by comparison, or how organisms that lived in methane-rich environments might be very different from our own.
As the book progresses, we eventually leave Earth and start to consider life on very different planets both within our solar system and even further abroad. He looks at the possibilities for life on the surfaces of very hot and very cold planets, on planets with different chemicals available for biological metabolism, and even above and below the surfaces (deep in the planet's crust, or high above in the atmosphere where the conditions for life may be possible). All throughout, Toomey injects the theories with examples found on Earth that are not so different, and in doing so provides a solid basis for the speculation. Similarly, he often provides some background to each idea and the scientist who proposed it, which helps again to ground the theories in some reality. You get the impression as you go along that even though much of the subject matter is speculative, it is all based in well-established science.
The end chapters - Simulated life, machine life, SETI, sci-fi, and parallel universes:
The final chapters dramatically widen the scope of the book and show the breadth of Toomey's thinking on weird life. They are perhaps some of the more intriguing and "out there" chapters, since they are decidedly much further out on the speculative branch of the tree and look much further into the future, or into the cosmos, than previous theories.
His discussions on simulated and machine life are particularly good and I think he is to be commended for the way he handled this part of the book. Having spent the previous hundred of so pages talking about strictly biological life, he provides an interest twist by opening up the possibility (perhaps the inevitability) of machine-based life - what we'd call A.I. In a theory that borrows heavily from futurist Ray Kurzwil, Toomey discusses the trend in human history towards machine-based systems and the seeming inevitability that at some point in the future we will no longer be biological creatures and instead become machines.
In a chapter that deals with SETI and its own takes on weird, extraterrestrial life, he talks about the concept of machine life and lays out the case for it being highly probable that if SETI does hear from some aliens in the sky, they will not be biological. He does this by pointing out to the grand scale of cosmic evolution. It took billions of years for planets to form, and only a fraction of that time for intelligent life to evolve on them. It is therefore unlikely that two intelligent civilizations would both evolve at the same time, in order to send each other messages (the kind that SETI would receive). It therefore stands to reason that any civilization still out there and transmitting messages would be highly advanced, and non-biological.
In all of this fascinating conjecture, it's clear that Toomey's speculations about weird life is much grander in scope than just what a silicon-based life form might be like. His broad view is commendable, and at its best, absolutely engrossing to think about.
Having not quite fully exploded the scope, however, he turns one of his final chapters to weirder life still: that which might exist in parallel universes. Although some of this conjecture comes off the rails a little bit, I still found the core ideas quite fascinating. Toomey has to do quite a bit of explanatory legwork in this chapter to first explain the basic ideas behind parallel universes. With a basic framework established, he then proceeds to imagine in very broad strokes, what life might be like in universes where things are different in the most fundamental of ways.
As an example, he begins by pointing out something we assume essential for life in our universe - we often say that if a proton had a slightly different weight, life here would be impossible. He then shows that current science has hypothesized a universe where protons with slightly increased weight would still be possible. They wouldn't be able to synthesize the organic compounds we consider essential for life, but they would be able to create other compounds that could, feasibly, serve as the basis for an alien biology.
Another example is even more extreme. Even if planets and suns couldn't form in a given universe, the argument goes, there is still the potential for life that exists in the interstellar medium, in dust clouds of enormous size that contain countless tiny dust grains, each with small amounts of chemicals clinging to them. Collectively these can form a kind of drifting, floating bio-chemical cloud in which evolution could occur and intelligence may even arise. Without suns for energy, they would look elsewhere (and the book previously provides many examples of organisms happily drawing energy from very unexpected sources).
By the time I'd turned the last page, my ideas of "weird life" had well and truly expanded! For that the book has been tremendously valuable.
Conclusion:
I've no doubt left things out, and my review is a bit scatter-shot, but hopefully it paints a picture of the scope of discussion in this book, if nothing else. I think that's Toomey's real strength here. He manages to drill into a substantial level of detail at each point, and yet still had ample room to keep expanding the discussion outward until we are well and truly in the domain of the weirdest life imaginable. If you're looking to expand your thinking about life, and if you have an interest in space and cosmology, this book will likely give you plenty to think about and be inspired by.
May 20, 2017
This would be a useful book for anyone planning to write science fiction.
I picked this up because I thought it would be about extremophiles. It isn't- extremophiles are only examined at the very beginning of this book. The author's main idea seems to be that, up until a few decades ago, creatures that could thrive in below-freezing and superheated environments were science fiction. Now that we know they are fact, what other fictional life forms might actually exist? How should that affect our search for extra-terrestrial life?
The book progresses further and further away from reality. From extremophiles, we proceed to life that can survive in sulfuric acid and methane-rich environments that exist in our solar system, like Saturn's moon, Titan. No such life has been discovered, but it is plausible enough that space agencies want to send probes to look.
Next is silicon-based life and robotic sentience, and then we get to really speculative stuff like life in universes with different physics, virtual life, and life in higher and lower dimensions.
As you might expect, the farther you go from existing life, the more the author relies on examples in science fiction versus actual science. This didn't really bother me because A) these fictional ideas are highly creative (and not completely impossible), and B) the book is short, so it just briefly explores these ideas without taking them too seriously and veering into pseudoscience.
If you're looking for dense, hard science, this isn't a good choice. If you're looking for a philosophical study of the definition of life, look elsewhere. If you want a quick tour of unexpected life on earth and what that could mean for life we find out in the universe, then give this a try.
I picked this up because I thought it would be about extremophiles. It isn't- extremophiles are only examined at the very beginning of this book. The author's main idea seems to be that, up until a few decades ago, creatures that could thrive in below-freezing and superheated environments were science fiction. Now that we know they are fact, what other fictional life forms might actually exist? How should that affect our search for extra-terrestrial life?
The book progresses further and further away from reality. From extremophiles, we proceed to life that can survive in sulfuric acid and methane-rich environments that exist in our solar system, like Saturn's moon, Titan. No such life has been discovered, but it is plausible enough that space agencies want to send probes to look.
Next is silicon-based life and robotic sentience, and then we get to really speculative stuff like life in universes with different physics, virtual life, and life in higher and lower dimensions.
As you might expect, the farther you go from existing life, the more the author relies on examples in science fiction versus actual science. This didn't really bother me because A) these fictional ideas are highly creative (and not completely impossible), and B) the book is short, so it just briefly explores these ideas without taking them too seriously and veering into pseudoscience.
If you're looking for dense, hard science, this isn't a good choice. If you're looking for a philosophical study of the definition of life, look elsewhere. If you want a quick tour of unexpected life on earth and what that could mean for life we find out in the universe, then give this a try.
January 15, 2018
I've always found the biology of the deep, deep ocean fascinating, and this book gives a nice overview of some of that. I found my attention wondering as author David Toomey got more and more theoretical as the book progressed, but still found it worth reading.
It is amazing to think just how much we don't know. From the book:
"The Census of Marine Life, a decade-long project to make a comprehensive tally of life in Earth's oceans, found 5,000 previously unknown species, including an animal that lives without oxygen, several species believed to be extinct since the Jurassic period, and 600-year-old tube worms. ... Of species still undiscovered, it is possible that some are quite large. As recently as the mid-1990s, scientists were astonished to discover a 200-pound animal inhabiting the mountains shared by Vietnam and Laos. It looks part antelope and part cow but, now classified as the only member of the genus Pseudoryx, is neither."
It is amazing to think just how much we don't know. From the book:
"The Census of Marine Life, a decade-long project to make a comprehensive tally of life in Earth's oceans, found 5,000 previously unknown species, including an animal that lives without oxygen, several species believed to be extinct since the Jurassic period, and 600-year-old tube worms. ... Of species still undiscovered, it is possible that some are quite large. As recently as the mid-1990s, scientists were astonished to discover a 200-pound animal inhabiting the mountains shared by Vietnam and Laos. It looks part antelope and part cow but, now classified as the only member of the genus Pseudoryx, is neither."
September 22, 2018
I thought this was going to be about 'extremophiles,' those bits of the natural world that thrive in places too hot or too cold or dark or acidic for conventional life. It was actually about the entierely theoretical possibility of life with no common ancestry with anything we're aware of - e.g. life that might be based on silicon or arsenic instead of carbon or water.
This way Interesting in parts, but too esoteric to be satisfying on the whole. The turn towards theoretical physics in the later chapters felt really speculative, and honestly a bit mystic, to me. If anything the chapters on the 'multiverse' and SETI really came across as delusional wishful thinking by physicists, leaving me rather sceptical about the possibility of life on other worlds Probably most use to a SF writer looking to mine 'out there' ideas. Not much use or interest to anyone whose focus is on the environment or the natural world
This way Interesting in parts, but too esoteric to be satisfying on the whole. The turn towards theoretical physics in the later chapters felt really speculative, and honestly a bit mystic, to me. If anything the chapters on the 'multiverse' and SETI really came across as delusional wishful thinking by physicists, leaving me rather sceptical about the possibility of life on other worlds Probably most use to a SF writer looking to mine 'out there' ideas. Not much use or interest to anyone whose focus is on the environment or the natural world
April 29, 2018
This was a pretty good intro to life as we know it to prepare you to consider the possibility of life wildly different from ours. This book explores the possibility of different forms of life from the planetary crust up through ocean vents to land, atmosphere, comets, and other dimensions(!), through cutting edge science to speculative science fiction. It's mostly focused on the microbial because that appears to be the bulk of life and its beginnings, but has a cool section on intelligent life which could have been more thoroughly explored.
May 25, 2017
For such a short book, this one covers a lot of ground: from extremophiles to the ultimate-ensemble multiverse and beyond. The treatment is light and readable and does not shy away from purely speculative and science-fictional aspects of the subject. A good intro to a rather narrow subset of astrobiological problems that covers a bit of introductory physics, astrophysics and cosmology as well.
December 21, 2017
Interesting read about what life there could be, what we've tried to do to find it and how it may operate. It's crazy to realise how much we don't know about life right now so I'm excited to see what will follow. The book starts off with a down to Earth look at how we got to our current understanding and leaps off into fantastic ideas and research about what we may find.
September 14, 2020
Some interesting stuff, but way too much minutia. If you are truly interested in the possibility and chemistry of methane and ammonia based life on Europa or Titan, and love to read the names of all the scientists working on every project done in the last twenty years or so, then this is the book for you. But not me.
May 10, 2013
This was a *fascinating* read. It's basically about the search for life *not* as we know it-- creatures that exist wholly outside of our own evolutionary chain or what we know as "familiar" life (some of which isn't so familiar). The book moves from the unusual (creatures that don't quite fit into the classifications we're used to), to life as we have only recently come to know it (the extremophiles that thrive in conditions on Earth that we (humans) previously believed could not sustain life), to actual (as-yet-undiscovered) "weird" life-- *truly* alien life forms that might be based on a chemistry utterly different from Earth's organic life. (And btw, there IS a very useful glossary in the back.)
Roughly the first third of the book discusses the problems of defining "life" (harder than you'd think), the false assumptions that hampered and limited scientists' discoveries of unusual (but still "familiar") life forms in the past, and how some out-of-the-box thinkers and surprise discoveries broke through those assumptions. To me, this was the strongest part of the book, and the part I learned the most from (including an entire taxonomic kingdom that didn't exist when I was in school). The array of life that shares a planet with us-- including some that share a BODY with us-- is really mind-boggling. A fungus that lives INSIDE the water core of Chernobyl's nuclear reactor? Bacteria that thrive deep under the Earth's crust? Microbes that chow down on arsenic? Microscopic critters that can live in SPACE? HELL, YEAH. All these and more, including the amazing stories of their discovery. The author's particularly skilled at personalizing the scientists that study these critter, really making their motivations and excitement and frustrations come alive for the reader.
The next third talks about the search for life outside of our planet, and here's where things start getting more technical. The author talks about the attempt to pin down what really basic requirements for life *are,* so that (given the SIZE of the universe) we might narrow down our search to places where life could definitively exist. *Are* there outer limits of temperature, radiation, and chemistry? If so, what are they? How do we avoid falling into the same traps that prevented us from recognizing extreme "familiar" life on our OWN planet? From there, we get into the problems of how to recognize life once we've found it, particularly given that most of the exploration and experimenting will be carried out by machines over planetary distances. What do we look for? How do we look? How do we test for various forms of life (particularly extremophiles) without accidentally killing it? (And if we do accidentally kill it, would we recognize that the remains were once alive?) There's a lot of discussion here of NASA's various programs (the Office of Life Sciences, SETI, etc.) and a bit of the politicking behind them, and a discussion of what types of experiments are currently aboard our existing probes. (A big part of the problem is that our current probes are all set to test for *familiar* life, and might miss weird life entirely.) He also talks about the planets and moons in our own solar system that might be good candidates for weird life, and where scientists would REALLY like to start looking first (and why they're not).
The last third of the book (which I admit I skimmed, since by this point I was really struggling to follow the flights of scientific theory) gets highly theoretical, speculating about types of life as proposed in science fiction and life as it might exist outside the traditional universe (quantum physics comes into play).
As I said above, I enjoyed the concrete portions of this book a lot more than the theoretical ones. The edges of our known universe were plenty fascinating enough, and I would have liked to have spent more time on that. (And I did, browsing the 'net for more on extremophiles.) The theoretical half of the book isn't exactly weaker-- the science is VERY strong and convincing, and a lot of the concepts he talks about are pretty darn exciting. But the reader runs up against exactly the same problem the scientists themselves are having-- how do you think about something that's totally and completely outside the wheelhouse of everything you know and understand? The problem is that we *haven't* discovered weird life yet, and so the author is stuck with trying to describe and quantify the utter unknown. It really does give you an idea of the struggles scientists face in discovering weird life, but it makes for some pretty difficult reading, conceptually.
This book is MOST DEFINITELY worth the read for as much as you can get through. If you enjoy learning about new things, this book has that IN SPADES. (Seriously, I ran out of adjectives for "amazing" in trying to describe it.) But fair warning to layfolk-- depending on how much scientific background you have, the second half of the book gets into some pretty advanced concepts, and might be a real slog. My advice is to work through as much as you can, and then skip to the epilogue for the author's conclusions. Even if you can't finish it, you will NOT regret reading it.
Roughly the first third of the book discusses the problems of defining "life" (harder than you'd think), the false assumptions that hampered and limited scientists' discoveries of unusual (but still "familiar") life forms in the past, and how some out-of-the-box thinkers and surprise discoveries broke through those assumptions. To me, this was the strongest part of the book, and the part I learned the most from (including an entire taxonomic kingdom that didn't exist when I was in school). The array of life that shares a planet with us-- including some that share a BODY with us-- is really mind-boggling. A fungus that lives INSIDE the water core of Chernobyl's nuclear reactor? Bacteria that thrive deep under the Earth's crust? Microbes that chow down on arsenic? Microscopic critters that can live in SPACE? HELL, YEAH. All these and more, including the amazing stories of their discovery. The author's particularly skilled at personalizing the scientists that study these critter, really making their motivations and excitement and frustrations come alive for the reader.
The next third talks about the search for life outside of our planet, and here's where things start getting more technical. The author talks about the attempt to pin down what really basic requirements for life *are,* so that (given the SIZE of the universe) we might narrow down our search to places where life could definitively exist. *Are* there outer limits of temperature, radiation, and chemistry? If so, what are they? How do we avoid falling into the same traps that prevented us from recognizing extreme "familiar" life on our OWN planet? From there, we get into the problems of how to recognize life once we've found it, particularly given that most of the exploration and experimenting will be carried out by machines over planetary distances. What do we look for? How do we look? How do we test for various forms of life (particularly extremophiles) without accidentally killing it? (And if we do accidentally kill it, would we recognize that the remains were once alive?) There's a lot of discussion here of NASA's various programs (the Office of Life Sciences, SETI, etc.) and a bit of the politicking behind them, and a discussion of what types of experiments are currently aboard our existing probes. (A big part of the problem is that our current probes are all set to test for *familiar* life, and might miss weird life entirely.) He also talks about the planets and moons in our own solar system that might be good candidates for weird life, and where scientists would REALLY like to start looking first (and why they're not).
The last third of the book (which I admit I skimmed, since by this point I was really struggling to follow the flights of scientific theory) gets highly theoretical, speculating about types of life as proposed in science fiction and life as it might exist outside the traditional universe (quantum physics comes into play).
As I said above, I enjoyed the concrete portions of this book a lot more than the theoretical ones. The edges of our known universe were plenty fascinating enough, and I would have liked to have spent more time on that. (And I did, browsing the 'net for more on extremophiles.) The theoretical half of the book isn't exactly weaker-- the science is VERY strong and convincing, and a lot of the concepts he talks about are pretty darn exciting. But the reader runs up against exactly the same problem the scientists themselves are having-- how do you think about something that's totally and completely outside the wheelhouse of everything you know and understand? The problem is that we *haven't* discovered weird life yet, and so the author is stuck with trying to describe and quantify the utter unknown. It really does give you an idea of the struggles scientists face in discovering weird life, but it makes for some pretty difficult reading, conceptually.
This book is MOST DEFINITELY worth the read for as much as you can get through. If you enjoy learning about new things, this book has that IN SPADES. (Seriously, I ran out of adjectives for "amazing" in trying to describe it.) But fair warning to layfolk-- depending on how much scientific background you have, the second half of the book gets into some pretty advanced concepts, and might be a real slog. My advice is to work through as much as you can, and then skip to the epilogue for the author's conclusions. Even if you can't finish it, you will NOT regret reading it.
October 10, 2019
HUMAN, TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER!
Don’t you worry, it’s gonna happen soon. We’re gonna be shakin hands, tentacles, pseudopods, whatever with extraterrestrials soon enough. Be they bacterial or mega size. Toomey tells us how.
Don’t you worry, it’s gonna happen soon. We’re gonna be shakin hands, tentacles, pseudopods, whatever with extraterrestrials soon enough. Be they bacterial or mega size. Toomey tells us how.
January 15, 2020
We, who are about to crash head-first into the Great Filter, salute you, machine lords of outer space. And methane bacteria: you're cool, too. Enjoy your pond! Or atmospheric eddy!
Surface-level examination/survey of possibilities, but interesting.
Surface-level examination/survey of possibilities, but interesting.
June 11, 2017
A good primer on the search for extraterrestrial life, or even just life that's different from our own. Definitely interesting, but not so interesting that it changed my life. Just a good read.
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