Lucky Planet

by David Waltham

Science tells us that life elsewhere in the Universe is increasingly likely to be discovered. Lucky Planet uses recent geological, biological and astronomical discoveries to question this conventional wisdom and suggest that the Earth may have had '4 billion years of good weather' purely by chance: we are on a rare planet where all the bad things that could have happened to the climate have fortunately cancelled each other out.

Combining his own research with the latest results from the Earth sciences, geophysicist and astrobiologist David Waltham has written a uniquely compelling and radically unorthodox popular science book, aguing persuasively that we are probably alone - and on a very special planet.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Astronomy, Environment, Biology, Physics, Nature

225 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 2014

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, Gaia or Goldilocks? The author is an astrobiologist and a geophysicist at the University of London, so he looks at the last two and leans toward Goldilocks: the earth, like the porridge, just happens to be right for life, not too hot, not too cold. It may just be coincidence that explains earth’s 4 billion years of good weather, that is, climate favorable to life, and that’s how we’ve avoided frying or freezing as would have happened to us on other planets. In the book we learn odds and ends: mini-biographies, such as Giordano Bruno, forerunner of Copernicus; a sketch of, plate tectonics; a brief history of space exploration and the search for exoplanets.

But the key question is, and most of the book’s focus is on, biological and geological regulation of temperature with assistance from players such as the moon, that helps stabilize an otherwise dangerous wobble in the earth’s orbit. Many folks, including many scientists, assume that a Gaia-type process (biological self-regulation on a planetary scale – aka Daisyworld) moderates the climate but Waltham is skeptical: such biological feedback systems are as likely to provide positive feedback and thus upset the applecart. He creates a “Moldy Pineworld” model as an illustration.

We learn how sparse life is in most of the oceans due to a deficiency of iron; Azolla, a fern that created floating mats that filled up the Arctic Ocean during warmer, less saline times; that 95% of suns in the universe are smaller than ours, and why that is good and bad; and that statistically speaking, intelligent life has to arise near the end of the habitable period on a planet (only 500 million years to go!). And we learn that once self-replicating molecules developed, multi-cellular organisms independently evolved at least three and maybe as many as ten times in earth’s history.

A good read; thought-provoking and written at about the level of an intro college science course.

[Simon Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lucky Planet can basically be summarised in one sentence: it's the anthropic principle, stupid!

The book provides a good summary of basic aspects of climate: orbital/astronomical considerations, geological/carbon cycles, and radiative physics. It goes on to discuss and critique the Gaia hypothesis, and emphasises how unusual the Earth is in harbouring the exact right conditions for life for long enough for intelligence to evolve.

It's fine, and features a particularly convincing discussion of anthropogenic climate change from a skeptical perspective, but didn't do anything particularly impressive for me.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the most part, I found Lucky Planet interesting enough, though at times there were gaps when it comes to the possibilities for life elsewhere — and no mention at all of the idea that there could be life somewhere else on Earth which uses molecules of the opposite chirality to us, suggesting more than one separate origin of life. There was nothing about the Viking biological experiments, which per Michael Brooks’ pop-science books are still thought by some to have shown evidence for life on Mars — the experimenter, Levin, still thinks so, and he’s not alone.

I think the problem with all these theories is that they rely on a gut feeling of how likely life is to arise and, once arisen, to become intelligent. Obviously, as Waltham points out repeatedly, because we exist, conditions are possible in which we can exist and observe (a condition called the anthropic principle). That tells us nothing in itself about how likely life is to arise, though. In fact, with everything that might indicate how likely life is to arise, we have a sample size of one.

It’s really impossible to scientifically judge, I think. It depends on whether you decide life is likely or unlikely, and follows from there. Waltham does discuss all the factors that make Earth a rarity, which may constrain life. But again, sample size of one, so how do we know that a planet’s satellites or seismic activity or atmosphere or predominant minerals are important or not? Life doesn’t have to look the same as us (but if it did, that would go a fair way to confirming Waltham’s point; we require very specific circumstances to have arisen, after all).

So, if you’re looking for an answer, I don’t think Waltham has one for you (though nor does anyone else, by the same logic).

Originally posted here.

[Sajith Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The earth’s atmosphere is slowly warming up by the increasing contribution of carbon dioxide in it. Scientists are justifiably worried by this global warming because of the uncertainties associated with its causes and mechanisms. The greenhouse effect which drives global warming is a very dangerous thing as we can witness on the Venusian surface. Its atmosphere is almost fully constituted by carbon dioxide (96%) and the associated warming has escalated the surface temperature to a blistering 460 degrees Celsius. Compare this to earth’s 15 degrees C. How come our planet turned out to be an ideal ‘cold spot’ for life? Analysing the earth’s past buried in rocks and ocean sediments bring out the picture of a habitable planet for most of its existence. This book examines the reason for this life-friendliness of earth. All parameters that control the weather are free to swing in any direction that can cause havoc, but we have been able to stave off disaster till now. This book investigates the idea that good fortune, or plain luck, infrequently repeated elsewhere in the universe, played a significant role in allowing the long-term habitability of earth and shows why it is unlikely to find similarly complex life elsewhere in the universe. David Waltham is a lecturer at the University of London, which he joined after a stint in the oil industry as a geologist. He is basically a physicist with an immense background in handling various aspects of geology.

Ancient societies gave our planet a prime position in their mythology and thought that other heavenly bodies revolve around it. Modern religion presumed it to be a special creation of God for the benefit of mankind. Primacy began to erode in the Renaissance period when thinkers postulated about the likelihood of numerous planets very similar to our earth in the new worlds they were observing with their newly made telescopes. Early thinkers attributed earth’s privileged position to divine providence, whereas the author puts it down to good fortune: a good fortune that is inevitable somewhere in a big enough universe. As scientific knowledge grew, earth became just a chance composition that occurs in a very, very rare moment. Waltham hints that it has become scientific heresy to question Giordano Bruno’s insight of the mediocrity of earth's position. He reproduces the story of Bruno which makes us believe that his execution was caused not by the beliefs, but by his bothersome proclivity to make enemies of everyone he came into contact with. This book then claims that we need to return to a geocentric cosmology in the sense that the earth may be the most interesting place in the observable universe.

A good discussion on the greenhouse effect and its influence on warming and cooling the planet is included. Carbon dioxide, water vapour and methane are effective greenhouse gases that trap infrared rays escaping out of the ground and heat it up like a blanket. It is to be remembered here that water vapour is a greater greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and it is present in huge quantities in the atmosphere. Why then are we concerned only with carbon dioxide, whose share is a minuscule 0.04%? The author does not answer this question. However, greenhouse effect is not all evil. Without it, earth’s surface temperature would be directly related only to the amount of heat it received from the sun and how much it reflected back. Its temperature would then plummet to -18 degree Celsius from the cosy +15 degrees at present. Without this 33 degree temperature rise due to greenhouse effect, higher forms of life would not be possible. At this point, Waltham reminds us that global warming on much larger scales have occurred in the past when carbon dioxide doubled and mean temperature shot up by 8 degree Celsius 250 million years ago. This event is called Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction and was caused by volcanic eruptions that covered much of present-day Siberia. It killed off 95% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial species. Luckily, evolution had only reached the level of trilobites by that time. Five such events have occurred in the history of life. In each disaster, a substantial fraction of existing species died out to be replaced over the next 5 to 10 million years by new animals and plants that evolved from the survivors. Temperature is claimed to have oscillated from -50 degrees Celsius to +50 degrees Celsius – a change of 100 degrees in all. Anyhow, in the last 500 million years when visible life proliferated on the face of the earth, the swing has been a more modest 10 degrees.

Waltham worked in the oil sector in his professional career and confesses to receive funding from oil corporates for his research. One would then naturally conclude that he would cast aspersions or question global warming. He does nothing of the sort. Not only that, he lends support to calculational models used by climate change speculators and declares that he is not able to find much flaw in the software models employed by global warming proponents. There are great uncertainties in the prediction of future temperature changes but even very optimistic assumptions predict major difficulties ahead. So, global warming is here to stay!

We are now obsessed with carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the temperature spikes it can cause. This book presents a lot of astronomical issues that can wreak great disasters. Earth's axis is wobbling in space and its orbital elongation is sometimes affected by the gravitational pull of other planets. There are definite astronomical cycles that contribute to periodic heating and cooling of the planets. These have typically large periods like 41000 or 100000 years. It may come as a surprise to know that throughout the majority of earth's history, our planet has been much warmer than today and almost completely free of any sea ice. We are now living through a slightly warm inter-glacial period that separates one ice age in the past, around 11000 years ago and another ice age in the future.

Any discourse on climate balancing by the biosphere would not be complete without a mention of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory. Lovelock postulated a complex interaction between earth’s life forms and its climate using feedback mechanisms that help to stabilize the weather. However, Waltham is not very enthusiastic about it, blaming the hypothesis of its lack of unambiguous observational support and significant theoretical difficulties. An attack on a more fundamental level is made when the author warns that Gaia proponents might have got the cause and effect totally wrong. Instead of theorising that life contributes to a stable climate, it might well be possible that life became viable only due to environmental stability.

Waltham has incorporated a very long discussion on cosmology in which the physical laws and constants support life in this universe. This rakes up the issue of whether multiple universes or multiverses are possible, which is a favourite topic of popular science authors. But this won't further our ideas on the subject matter because what is known is so few and most of the ideas are only intelligent guesses at best or mere conjectures at worst. This narrative goes nowhere. The author asks the readers to make use of the internet for viewing pictures of other planets and stars mentioned in the book rather than looking through available telescopes which are of much poor quality then we expect. The book is easy to read but no point is made by the author because he claims that all life on earth is due to nothing but luck or good fortune. This is an extension of the anthropic principle. The saving grace is that he does not attribute divine intervention at any stage. Even then, it is to be doubted that he has left that final step in the argument for the readers to make out between the lines.

The book is recommended.

[Keith Akers · Rating 4 out of 5]

How likely is it that there is a lot of intelligent life in the universe? This book considers what it took to get life on earth. I had previously read Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, to which the present author briefly refers, and so thought that I wouldn’t be learning that much that was new. But even though Waltham reaches much the same verdict that Ward does, he gets there by a different route, focusing on climate stability. For life to develop, we need not just an “earth-like” planet with whatever magic factors bring life into being, but we need a planet that stays that way for a long time — climate stability.

So many factors can destabilize a planet’s climate. How have we managed to evade or counterbalance them all? We have already seen the historical Earth oscillate between “Snowball Earth” and “hothouse Earth” during fairly astronomically stable times. A large moon, it turns out, may actually destabilize the climate. Just the proliferation of life can destabilize the climate, as has actually happened in the past; a proliferation of pond weeds in the Arctic led to the end of the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum. Earth has been lucky because the gradual cooling of the atmosphere (fewer greenhouse gases) has been generally counterbalanced by the warming of the sun — a factor which, as far as we know, is due just to sheer luck.

[Jose Moa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is on the trail of Rare Earth but principally focussed on the stability of climate and average global temperaturas in the last 500 million years although the sun has increased his power roughly a 5% and by that time the autor says the temperaturas has followed a descending trend as consecuence of very improbable encompass of geological and biological process.Also makes a incursión in cosmolgy saying we live in a friendly life universo with the adecuate value of physical constants as the ratio between strong forcé and electromagnetic forcé that produces for example a stable nucleus of carbón in detriment of berilium and oxigen nucleus all obtained by fussion in the cores of stars,so carbón necesary for life is abundant,then said the improbable costitution of our solar system an the nearly exact relation of sizes between moon and earth that prevents gravitational resonance with other planets that would causes chaotical oscilations of the tilt os spin earth axe with climatic catastrophic consecuences .Makes a veiled critic of the Gaia hipothesis and belives more in odd good luck.The book dont examinesthe biological evolution nor the major events that propelled the evolution and diversity nor Drake equation nor Fermi paradox.For me the book is no too conving,not too well structured and rather speculative

[Kate Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd never really thought about how extremely fortunate we are to be alive on a planet that has had a stable enough climate for long enough so that complex creatures like us had enough time to evolve. The book speculates about how rare this is. I learned a lot about the conditions necessary for this kind of stability, such as the size of our moon and its distance from earth, the angle of earth's axis, whether there is a land mass at the poles, and several other factors. The author is quite willing to entertain views other than his own, coming across as humble and engaging as he tries to explain complex scientific topics to an average reader. Much to ponder.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional-and What That Means for Life in the Universe (2014) by David Waltham surveys the sprawling topic of life on Earth from a geological, climatological, and cosmological standpoint. As the title suggests, Waltham sees Earth as having several properties that make it conducive to life, including intelligent life, and which may prove to be rare as astronomers accumulate data on other planetary systems.

Waltham doesn't mention the Fermi Paradox by name but mentions the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence (SETI) and offers his explanation for the null results so far: space aliens haven't shown up because advanced technological civilizations may be so widely spaced that we are the only one in the portion of the universe visible to us.

In addition to the books Waltham cites, some other books are good to read along with this one:
* Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction
* Planetary Systems: A Very Short Introduction
* Solving Fermi's Paradox

And while Waltham's climatological interest is mostly with Earth's paleoclimate, he does mention man-made global warming a few times. He acknowledges it's a problem and he chides the climate change deniers, but he doesn't fully convey the scale and imminence of the climate calamity humans are working hard to cause. Instead he tends to write as if humans have a future. To see how unlikely that is, in light of humanity's refusal to change course on the necessary scale and speed, I recommend books on the topic, such as:
* Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency
* The Burning Question: We Can't Burn Half the World's Oil, Coal, and Gas. So How Do We Quit?
* The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate

[Bob Stocker · Rating 4 out of 5]

We hear a lot these days about climate change. Lucky Planet by David Waltham is a book about climate stability: four billion years of a relatively stable climate have allowed intelligent life to evolve on Earth. This is not to say that potential causes for climate change were absent during this time. For example, four billion years ago, the sun was likely much cooler than it is today. Life as we know it could not have developed if other factors had not helped keep the Earth warm. The book discusses arcane topics such as precession of the Earth's axis and reasons for ice ages without a single graph, diagram, or equation. I was left fascinated, but feeling that I needed to read the book a second time and explore some of the topics in more depth in order to fully appreciate Waltham's arguments.

[Julian Hadlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book because I am always curious about life in the universe, but I tend not to believe the "little green men" and "flying saucer" type of stories.

This book offers plenty of cohesive evidence that our planet is indeed a very special place, and in the grand scheme of things, there may not be too many similar in our back yard. Perhaps just one per galaxy.

However, Waltham argues that this is not because life is so hard to produce; quite the contrary.

He argues that we have had unusually long and good weather for billions of years that has allowed life here to flourish beyond what might be possible on other worlds. In other words, life also got a foothold there, but the planets did not offer a stable environment long enough for intelligent life to take hold.

Also, fascinatingly, Waltham lists many curious facts that join up the dots in almost anyone's knowledge, whether that be cosmology, the environment, or geology.

Well worth a read, even if you don't concur with him.

[Hemen Kalita · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an antithesis of the Gia theory which claims that bio-geological cooling effect of Earth has neutralized the solar warming effect since life began billions of years ago. Author rejects this idea and thinks that nothing other than sheer luck can explain the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. He explains this anthropic principle beautifully. He taught me many interesting facts about Ice ages, planetary orbit, size of the moon, greenhouse gases, dark energy and much more.

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Waltham is trying to be conversational, but failing and I cannot muster enough interest in sediment to continue. I was expecting a lot more about space and less about Earth's climate and geology. Stopped in Chapter 7.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another consideration of whether we should regard Earth as a typical planet, with the possibility of many Earth-like worlds (and subsequently the possibility of extra-terrestrial life) or whether we should see Earth's planetary development as very rare, with so many special circumstances that the possibility of other similar planets (and the consequent development of intelligent life) is vanishingly small. The angle he takes is the evidence that Earth's climate has been, all things considered, relatively stable, and that fact he takes as the sine qua non for the development of life to evolve into something other than bacteria. While there are have periods of climate change, those have been periodic, which coincides with the effect of the moon as a stabilizing influence on orbit and rotation. He makes a big deal of the size of the moon as important in creating conditions that promote the development of evolving life.
Not as lucid or wide-ranging as the other such studies I have encountered in the last year or two, such as Rare Earth, which he cites. The arguments for the way the mon affects rotation and orbit, and the whole concept of the precession of the orbit, was never as clear to me as I needed it to be. (Which means I need to investigate the whole idea of precession and how it works.)
He takes the recent search for, and the finding of, planets around other stars as a given, even as he explains how fine a discrimination is needed in interpreting the evidence of variations in a star's orbit, and in its fluctuations of brightness, caused, presumably, by planets' transiting the ball of their suns. He also accedes that as far as can be determined right now, those exo-planets are large gas giants orbiting too close to their suns to be candidates for the development of life.

[Richard Neumann · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book captured my attention, because I'm very curious about the Universe, and I thought that she would add some interest.
Generally, a review could be placed in two words: " anthropic principle" ‒ that's what it's all about.
Mostly, the book is boring; hard to read, had to skip a couple of chapters. However, there were interesting moments for me, too. E.g. "Daisyworld", canali , strings... stuff like that.

Nor about the universe, nor why our planet is exceptional.

[Canadian Scholar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like this type of book in general but felt that this one didn't offer much in the way of new information. The overall 'Lucky planet' concept comes off quite clearly but the book tends to drag on in parts where too much is being said with to little content to be conveyed. Perhaps if I read this before others I may have found it more compelling and interesting.

[Stephanie Mccallum · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is well written, engaging, and friendly to a layman audience. I don't particularly agree with the overall sentiment, but I think it was presented in such a way that wasn't overly aggressive or pushy. At the same time though, it wasn't particularly compelling, probably for the same reason.

[Daniel B-G · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a number of interesting facts in this, but that didn't compensate for the deficiencies in style and tone. The writer clearly doesn't like gaia theory so straw mans it a few too many times.

[Jane Pollack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible description of the complex interactions of astrophysics, geology, meteorology, all working together to create and maintain life on Earth.

[Chris Chester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Few argue the point that we are blessed to live on the planet we do, with all the ingredients necessary to create and sustain life. But how did this wonderful life-sustaining balance come to be?

Did an omnipotent creator bestow this paradise on mankind? Does life itself help balance the forces of Earth, moderating geological and climate swings to offer an opening for intelligent life? Or are we simply the beneficiaries of extraordinarily good fortune on a cosmic scale?

Based on the title, it's obvious that Waltham casts his lot with the latter group. We are lucky, he says, to live in a universe with fundamental laws of physics that allow for the creation of galaxies and planets and the basic building blocks of life. We are lucky to live in a solar system which provides the right raw materials and protection against solar winds, extra-planetary bombardments, and gravitational tricks from other planets. We're lucky to live on a planet with such a (relatively) stable climate governed by negative feedback loops. And we're lucky that this stability has ultimately opened the way for intelligent observers -- us.

If that seems like an awful lot of luck, that's because it is! According to the anthropic principle, observations about the laws of nature must be consistent with establishing intelligent life on Earth, because if they weren't, this observation would be impossible in the first place. So while it is extraordinary good luck, it is also a confirmation of the very fact that we exist.

This makes for some very depressing adjustments to the first calculations one uses to assess Fermi's Paradox. If we allow that Earth-like worlds are actually quite a bit more rare than is often assumed, and then add on the additional burdens of navigable interstellar travel, the impossible distance of space, and the minuscule amount of time that humans have been observing the heavens, then the prospects for meeting other intelligent beings are next to nil.

It's a very British view of the cosmos: we are functionally alone in the universe, all life on Earth is likely doomed to extinction a billion-and-change years from now, but rather than being depressed by this, which should all be awed by the fragile beauty of life and should do everything we can to preserve the Eden where we live.

Waltham's writing has a tendency to trundle into culdesacs of digression that can bore, but he occasionally hits on a particularly poignant observation that can illuminate everything. His description of the emergence of life as stemming from self-replicating molecules in volcanic seafloor vents led me off on a wonderful tangent reading about abiogenesis and the (perhaps) artificial notion that life is somehow distinct from the rest of the universe.

That's what I look for in a pop-science book -- stirring up curiosity -- and in that respect, this book is a big success.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not possible to like science books and not like this book. He's a geologist and not an expert on a lot of the topics he's explaining and therefore explains the topics better than an expert. He'll tell you about the expansion of the universe, the moon, the solar system, rotation of the earth around the sun and its axis, "canals" on Mars, historical climate, global warming and geological oddities about the earth.

He approaches all of his statements as a scientist should, and if he says something that is not on firm foundation, he lets the reader know.

The author thinks the specialness of intelligence on earth is a much rarer event than most other scientist think. He shows this by looking at the problem in three ways: criticizing the principal of mediocrity, embracing anthropomorphic logic, and showing how we know earth's climate has been incredibly stable for the last 500 million years and has been remarkably stable sense life started about 3 billion years ago and how that is not probable in the observable universe.

The author mostly rejects the Gaia hypothesis and would embrace a 'psuedo-Gaia" hypothesis. He argues that it takes things to be just right for the emergent property of Gaia to have happened and due to a host of very special "Lucky" happenstance they did happen here on earth.

My only real complaint about the book is that he could have written a book twice as long because he has enough more material to work with than what he presented. Regardless, even if you don't believe the intelligent live on earth is very hard to replicate in the rest of the observable universe he explains different areas of science so that anyone can learn from this book and enjoy.

[Garry Nixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The odds of there being many other planets being like ours, (moon, magnetic fields, tectonic plates, goldilocks' zone, the whole bit) are long. Despite the vast size of the Universe, or even just our galaxy, it's likely that we ARE indeed alone. Which I find comforting, actually.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many years, the prevailing scientific trend has been to describe Earth as a fairly "ordinary" or "common" type of planet and to extrapolate that many planets exist that are very similar to Earth and probably support abundant life, as Earth does. Waltham's book makes the argument that Earth is actually "exceptional" in that several physical factors have made Earth a "lucky" planet that supports abundant life while many fairly similar planets differ in some minor but important way. I don't particularly care how scientists settle this question, but Waltham's book is fascinating to the non-scientist mainly because he clearly and thoroughly takes the reader through the cosmological discoveries of the last 50 years that have radically changed the scientific view of the cosmos and the earth. I was engaged from beginning to end. As a non-scientist without particular gifts in math or physics, I know I missed some of Waltham's finer points, but still I was able to learn all kinds of fascinating new things. A great read!

[Paul Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing book with the proposition that, due to a specific set of circumstances, life on Earth is possibly unique. Author David Waltham, a geologist, says that Earth's rather stable climate over millions of years allowed life to evolve from single-celled creatures to the intelligent humans we know today. He explains how that stability came to pass, and why it's important to life as we know it.

He questions if any other planet in the universe could have had the good fortune to mimic Earth's evolution, and makes a strong case that none could have, and thus intelligent life could only have formed on Earth. He does acknowledge he might be wrong, and explains why, but argues otherwise.

A short, strong book that does get a bit confusing in parts, but is simplified enough for the average reader.

[Bärbel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raamatu autor mõtiskles selle üle, miks Maa nii eriline on ja kas kuskil võiks veel leiduda planeete, millel oleks võimalik elu. Palju oli juttu kliimast, temperatuuridest, elementidest, veidi ka universumi algusajast ja meie kuust. Teistest planeetidest natuke ka.
Alguses tundus üsna tüütu autori lähenemine teemale, nimelt tutvustas ta mingit nähtust ja siis teatas, et „aitab praeguseks, eks hilisemas peatükis räägin pikemalt.“ Seda võtet kasutas ta ikka mitu korda. Ja siis raamatu lõpu poole tuli teistsugune teade, et „mäletate, ma esimeses peatükis mainisin...“
Palju uut ei saanud teada. Pigem andis raamat kerge ülevaate teemast, aga samas ega ma poleks vist tahtnud 600-leheküljelist eriti detailset raamatut ka selle asemel lugeda. 😉

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science is based on truth and fact, yet to get to the facts one has to test many theories. While there are many truths yet to be discovered, Waltham shares his own theories, some which may be proven in our lifetime and others we can only continue to speculate on.

The book is readable, even for a non-scientist like myself. Waltham is clearly passionate and excited by the topic. Who doesn't like a scientist who uses exclamation points? My guess is that Hollywood isn't clamoring for the rights to this one. But on a larger scale I hope that the pursuit of new discoveries and science is based in the search for truth and not some menacing deeper agenda.

[Kadri · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was interesting, clear and rather concise. For those hoping that life will be find on some other planet soon, it would be a sad read, because if life really does need very specific conditions to arise, then we're in for a really long search.
It introduces the Gaia theory and the Rare Earth hypothesis.

[John Evans]

Extremely well written, but I'm not sure I buy the author's last argument about the likelihood of resonances driving an earth-like planet towards chaotic tilts being a serious show-stopper. What about marine life? What about solar system architectures that don't look anything like our own?

[Dominic · Rating 4 out of 5]

The central question of this book (are the conditions on Earth common or incredibly rare) is interesting enough but the huge ground that Waltham covers in an effort to answer that question steals the show. Fascinating stuff.

[Mills College Library]

577.22 W236 2014

[Linda]

rec by sci fri