The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets [Hardcover]

Alan Boss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2009

We are nearing a turning point in our quest for life in the universe—we now have the capacity to detect Earth-like planets around other stars. But will we find any?

In The Crowded Universe, renowned astronomer Alan Boss argues that based on what we already know about planetary systems, in the coming years we will find abundant Earths, including many that are indisputably alive. Life is not only possible elsewhere in the universe, Boss argues—it is common.

Boss describes how our ideas about planetary formation have changed radically in the past decade and brings readers up to date on discoveries of bizarre inhabitants of various solar systems, including our own. America must stay in this new space race, Boss contends, or risk being left out of one of the most profoundly important discoveries of all time: the first confirmed finding of extraterrestrial life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Debra Fischer, Professor of Astronomy, San Francisco State University
“Alan Boss is widely respected for his scientific research and for his ability to clearly convey forefront research to the public. The Crowded Universe is a delightful read that chronicles the twists and turns of the birth and evolution of the rapidly evolving field of exoplanet discovery.”

Michel Mayor, Professor of Astronomy, University of Geneva
“The discovery of exoplanets has transformed modern astronomy. In The Crowded Universe, renowned expert Alan Boss offers an exciting insider’s account of the quest for other Worlds.”

Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain
“The search for life beyond the Earth, and the study of planets orbiting other stars, are surely among the most fascinating topics in 21st century science. Alan Boss offers a clear and masterly guide to these exciting and fast-moving subjects.”

Dr. Paul Butler, Carnegie Institution of Washington
“In the past decade we have gone from complete ignorance of extrasolar planets to the verge of finding habitable planets. In The Crowded Universe, Alan Boss gives an extraordinary inside look at the people and events that have shaped the field. The excitement of discovery shines in Boss's elegant prose, and the work of centuries is seamlessly assembled for the non-expert reader."

Professor Geoff Marcy, Center for Integrative Planetary Science, UC Berkeley
"Rarely is the history of science so accurately told as in this lively and authoritative book. Alan Boss offers insights about our terrestrial origins, our extraterrestrial brethren, and our destiny in the Galaxy, placing our Earth in the cosmic context for the first time."

Dr. Frank Drake, Director, Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute CIRC
“The Crowded Universe is a thorough depiction of the events and people involved in one of the greatest milestones in the history of science: the detection of other planetary systems in the Milky Way. The author is one of the primary players in this ongoing saga, and he tells the story with commendable detail. If you want to see how science works at its best, read this book.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History and author of The Pluto Files
“The search for planets outside our solar system has become a cottage industry. In The Crowded Universe, Alan Boss weaves a ‘you are there’ narrative that reaches behind the scenes of this thrilling new field, exposing the reader to the people, the politics, and the sheer joy of doing science.”

Kirkus
"Solid coverage of one of the most exciting topics in science."

Scientific American
“Astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington predicts that CoRoT and Kepler will discover abundant Earths. These telescopes are poised to prove him right or wrong, and his book provides essential and fascinating background as the drama unfolds.”

Discover
“The space race is on. No, not back to the moon. The next great achievement for humanity will be to find alien life on another planet. Astronomer Boss gives an inside view of how new space telescopes like Kepler and Corot are on the verge of finding Earth-like worlds around other stars.”

New Scientist
"Boss recounts the exhilarating tale of the race to discover the first truly Earth-like exoplanet. As The Crowded Universe unfolds, it brings alive the thrills and disappointments of bleeding-edge science, the fierce competition between American and European planet-hunting teams and the politics of billion-dollar research. Along the way we learn the latest theories on how planets form and just how astronomers detect distant worlds too faint to see."

BBC Focus Magazine
"If Alan Boss's excellent new book is anything to go by, the next few years could see some dramatic revelations about our cosmic neighbourhood... In 'The Crowded Universe' he skilfully recounts how astronomers have gradually become better acquainted with the exoplanets - planets orbiting stars other than the Sun... This is top-notch-and-timely popular science meets page-turning political intrigue."

Natural History
“In this short and lucid review of his field, [Boss] traces the developments of the last fifteen years in chronological, diarylike entries, so that we can share with him the excitement of discovery…. The tone of Boss’s book, accordingly, is excited and hopeful, but there’s also a note of wry irony in his descriptions of the political trials astronomers have gone through trying to promote their research. And despite the successes of the past decade, Boss senses that it may be increasingly difficult for astronomers to attract the sums needed to continue the search for habitable planets. Readers of this book, I am certain, will hope his fears are unsubstantiated.”

Space Times
“[The Crowded Universe] is a stunning story, recasting scientists as detectives developing and using new tools to expand knowledge of our exciting universe.”

Choice
“[T]he book reads like an adventure yarn, reminiscent of archaeologists looking for fabled lost cities…. [A] thoroughly fascinating account.”

About the Author

One of the world’s leading authorities on the formation of stars and planets, Alan Boss is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Meteoritical Society, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 16 and up
  
• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (February 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465009360
• ISBN-13: 978-0465009367
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,058,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Are We Alone in the Universe? Finding Earth-like Planets Will Help Us Learn the Answer, January 15, 2010

By 

Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets (Hardcover)

Ask any group of people, regardless of the group: "do you believe that there is life beyond Earth?" The answer is always a resounding, "yes." Ask them what evidence they have for believing this and the response is less enthusiastic. Notwithstanding the wackos who claim visitations of aliens, there is not one scintilla of evidence thus far produced to suggest that life on this planet has company anywhere else in the universe. That fact may change soon, and "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets" chronicles the process whereby this may happen. It is a stunning story, recasting scientists as detectives developing and using new tools to expand knowledge of our exciting universe.

Scientist Alan Boss, on the staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, has found a second career as an interpreter of the scientific enterprise for the general public. His earlier book, "Looking for Earths: The Race to Find New Solar Systems" (Wiley, 1998), successfully opened the search for the first discoveries of planets around other stars to a much broader audience than ever reads the scholarly literature. "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets" continues that theme, carrying the story to the present. In the process, Boss chronicles how the first detection of extrasolar planets rocked the scientific world in 1995 and has given impetus to the search. Using new instruments, technologies, and techniques a loose confederation of scientists around the world are engaged in detecting and cataloguing the number of extrasolar planets around other stars. More than 330 have thus far been discovered, but all of them are giants similar to Jupiter and Saturn rather than terrestrial, Earth-like plants.

That may change soon, however, and Boss is convinced that in the next few years we will find Earths in abundance, some of which will be enough like ours to conclude that they are indisputably alive. Boss insists that life is not only possible elsewhere in the universe but is the normal state. He may well be right, and this book is an explication of how we came to this point in time as well as an analysis of how and why expectations for the discovery of Earth-like planets are so positive.

He discusses how scientific theories about planetary formation have changed radically in the past decade, leading many to conclude that the conditions that spawned life on Earth also took place elsewhere. Boss also uses the excitement of seeking life beyond Earth as the fundamental rationale for continued support in the United States for a robust space exploration program. Failure to do so, Boss contends, would mean that the U.S. would be a spectator in what could arguably be the most profound discovery in human history--extraterrestrial life.

Alan Boss may well be right; indeed, I hope he is. Perhaps it is somewhat like the tagline from the "X-Files," the 1990s television series concerning the search for extraterrestrial visitation of Earth, "I Want to Believe." But hopes have been dashed so often in looking for life beyond Earth that I must, if only for sanity's sake, take a skeptical view and not get too excited by the possibility.

I am reminded of the classic cognitive dissonance model defined by Leon Festinger in his seminal 1956 book, "When Prophecy Fails." Festinger asked the question, what happens when a prediction to which a social group subscribes fails completely and without ambiguity? What happens to its faithful supporters? Reason would suggest that members of the group would abandon the ideas that proved faulty. But true believers do not automatically abandon their cause when reality intrudes in discomforting ways. They rarely admit that they were wrong or change their behavior. Instead they modify just enough of their beliefs to hang on to its essence. We have seen this many times in the search for life beyond Earth. We expected to find life on Mars in 1976 when Viking landed there. We found that Mars is dead. We modified belief only modestly to suggest that perhaps Mars once long ago harbored life and began looking for signs of its extinction, and then we began looking for evidence of past water on Mars, the fundamental building block of life, and continue doing so to the present.

What has happened repeatedly, we adjust our belief ever so slightly. But we never seem to consider the possibility that we might be alone in the universe. Is Alan Boss engaging in wishful thinking by believing that Earth-like planets beyond this solar system are common? Will his predictions prove out, or once again are we placing hope in efforts that will eventually fail to detect evidence of life? I hope the answer to both questions is "no." The only way to know is to continue efforts to learn the answer. Like Boss, I hope the U.S. continues to pursue this question aggressively. Meantime, I will remain a hopeful skeptic.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How many other Earths are out there?, February 24, 2009

By 

Steve Reina (Troy Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets (Hardcover)

In 1600 Giodorno Bruno was burned at the stake for saying that the stars of the night sky were surrounded by planets which themselves had life like here on Earth.

The same ignorance which consigned Bruno to the flames also was present in many modern opinions regarding the search for Earth like planets and extra terrestrial life.

As funding for projects like Project SETI and extra terrestrial planet searches languished it fell to a hearty few like this book's author Allan Boss to meaningfully advance the cause.

And thanks to their efforts we now possess a list of 300 and counting extra terrestrial planets ranging from big Earth sizes to big Jupiter sizes.

In fact now science can say for sure that other Earths are perhaps as common anywhere from 1 in ten stars to 1 in a thousand. The details of course are the provence of continued research which this book says will yield meaningful conclusions by as early as summer of this year.

Whatever the findings the results will be significant. Conventional thinking suggests that planets like Earth would exhibit conditions friendly to the development of life and perhaps with it, life capable of developing technology.

For my part I believe that however common life generally is we probably have the best chance of finding it somewhere during the existence of our species of any time in cosmic history. The reason I believe this is because we exist and there's no reason to suppose that our existence is any way special or different from life that would otherwise emerge elsewhere.

Now, all that being said, it does remain true that if life is common but rare (closer to one planet among a thousand stars) then it also follows that the likely galactic distances between us and our nearest neighbors would be effectively insurmountable by any type of technology we possess or can expect to possess in the near future.

But still, just the knowledge that "they" are out there is inherently exciting, not the least of which because that the reciprocal would be implied and finally someone off of Earth would be aware of our presence.

It's an astounding fact of history that all these discoveries could be made so close to a time when even contemplating them was punishable by death.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Boss is not a storyteller, March 22, 2011

By 

David DeGraff - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Crowded Universe (Kindle Edition)

The Crowded Universe by Alan Boss, the story of the search for planets around other stars, is a very disappointing book. It reads like a series of journal entires. We find out what happens on various dates with a little background thrown in, but it is totally lacking in the qualities that make a science book interesting. There is no narrative structure holding the thing together. Something happened one day. The next journal entry is about something completely different, then three entries later, we go back to the first bit. That's not satisfying. There's no characterization of the scientists involved. Since Boss is one of the players in this drama, I was hoping to get some insight into what these people are like, sense of humor, other interests, but that was also lacking. Finally, I read science to learn something new about a topic, and the book misses the mark there too, but mostly because I totally lost interest about 30% through the book because of the other two flaws.