Universal Life: An Inside Look Behind the Race to Discover Life Beyond Earth

by Alan Boss

After decades of painstaking planning, NASA's first dedicated exoplanet detection mission, the Kepler space telescope, was launched in 2009 from Cape Canaveral. Kepler began a years-long mission of looking for Earth-like planets amongst the millions of stars in the northern constellations of Lyra and Cygnus. Kepler's successful launch meant that it was only a matter of time before we would know just how many Earth-like planets exist in our galaxy. A revolution in thinking about our place in the universe was about to occur, depending on what Kepler found. Are earths commonplace or rare? Are we likely to be alone in the universe? Only Kepler could start to answer these vexing questions.

Universal Life provides a unique viewpoint on the epochal events of the last two decades and the excitement of what will transpire in the coming decades. Author Alan Boss's perspective on this story is unmatched. Boss is the Chair of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group, and was also on the Kepler Mission science team. Kepler proved that essentially every star in the night sky has a planetary system, and that most of these systems contain a habitable world, potentially capable of evolving and supporting life. Universal Life summarizes the current state of exoEarth knowledge, and also reveals what will happen next in the post-Kepler world, namely the narrowing of the search for habitable worlds to the stars that are the closest to Earth, those that offer the best chances for future ground- and space-based telescopes to search for, and detect, possible signs of life in their atmospheres. We have come far in the search for life beyond the Earth, but the most exciting phase
is about to we may soon be able to prove that we are not alone in the universe.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Nature

228 pages, Hardcover

Published January 7, 2019

Reviews

[E.M. Swift-Hook · Rating 3 out of 5]

The highs and lows of the search for exoplanets

I must confess to being a complete amateur in the field of astrophysics. That means I was reading this with a lot of interest but very much as a general reader and one with not much prior understanding of this specific topic. Someone who is more expert would perhaps take it in a very different way.
Alan Boss, having started in 1988, was in pretty much from the ground floor of the NASA project to be able to create the capacity to perceive and identify planets which could sustain life as we know it. This is an almost a blow by blow account of his (and other people’s) planet-hunting and it encompasses the scientific issues and results as well as the economic, political, and human aspects which have either helped - or more often - hindered the process.


What I enjoyed:
The dream. It may seem odd, but behind every scientist is a dream. We tend to view these men and women as being girt by their rationality and armed with logic, mathematics, repeatable experiments and peer-reviewable results. But, as this book shows, all that is driven by a dream and in this case the dream is of finding life elsewhere in the universe. That dream seeps through on even the driest pages in this book.
The detail. This is a detail book. It takes the reader through the events step by step explaining what worked, what didn’t and how it all impacted. The interlocking nature of different aspects of NASA’s work (and their interagency competition and cooperation) the successes and frustrations of the technological and scientific development and the struggles that had very little to do with science itself, to keep the project progressing.
The touches of humour. In what could become at times a very dry diet of facts, the author managed to sprinkle a leavening of humour. In particular with the numerous section headings which have things like ‘Tau Ceti or Bust’ and ‘This Is getting Boring.. Not!’ and my favourite ‘Who Wants A Probe?’

What I struggled with:
The accessibility. As I said at the beginning, I am only a general reader, but I do have some interest in the topic and have read a few articles about it. There were places in the book where I floundered in the information and had to skip on a few sentences or more to arrive back on solid ground. I am not sure a general reader with zero prior knowledge would be able to get that much from this book.
The detail. There is good detail and there is bad detail. And whilst the book has an abundance of the first kind it also has an overabundance of the second kind. So whilst I was fascinated to learn about how the Kepler team found ever more creative ways to keep their baby working despite its failing reaction wheels, I was not anything like as enthralled by what sometimes seemed like lists of organisations and sums of money.
The acronyms. There is nothing like an acronym to make an outsider know their place. The book includes a five-and-a-half page long list of the acronyms and abbreviations used in the text. By the end I was no longer flipping to that appendix three or four times per page as I did at the start, but that was as much from giving up worrying about it as from learning what they all meant.

Overall thoughts:
The search for life on other planets begins with the search for planets where life might be found. This book is a historical account of that search as it happened. One day it may inform a docudrama. If you are already au fait with the field I think you will enjoy it. It is an ‘in’ book about the community it reports upon. If, like me, you are an interested general reader, it does contain some fascinating insights into life on planet NASA but is more something to keep on the coffee table and dip into now and then rather than read cover to cover.

[Julian Onions · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book if you are interested in astronomical progress. However I doubt most, even amateurs, will find it as interesting. It goes through the search for habitable Earth like planets, and does spend a little of the time on things like Kepler and so on. However much of it is spent on the politics of trying to get various missions funded and what is happening in US space research. I found this fascinating and was a real insight to the struggles NASA and projects go through, but I can't think this would appeal to that many people.

[Peter Tillman]

Nature reviewer Barbara Kiser, in her best-of-week column https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158... , says:
"Astrophysicist Alan Boss, chair of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group, delivers a blow-by-blow history of the emergent findings by Kepler (and other instruments, including Europe’s CoRoT satellite) that details the political vagaries and tensions between various agencies, along with the scientific thrills."

Hmm. Could be a dozer. Wait & see....