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The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets

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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.

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.

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.

THE CROWDED UNIVERSE: THE SEARCH FOR LIVING PLANETS comes from a renowned astronomer who argues that we're on the verse of finding many Earth-like planets around other stars - planets where life is not just possible, but common. His ideas about planetary formation and life possibilities makes for an outstanding study key to any high school to college-level astronomy collection as well as any general-interest lending library strong in science.

I did not buy this book to learn about science budget problems, whose to blame, and the writers political leanings, right or left. I'm am just not interested in those things. I get the feeling the author was writing more to his work associates then the average science reader and book buyer. I expected a book on exo-planets. I did not get what I expected.

I found this book to be a bit disappointing, as it read more like a report to NASA employees than a popular science book.

Although there are tidbits about the science of planet-hunting, there is too much about the politics and budgeting issues at NASA. Also, the reading level is inconsistent. On one extreme the basics of doppler shift and the light year are explained at a junior high school level, but on the other extreme there are a lot of astronomical terms left vaguely defined.

I wish Dr. Boss and his team good luck with the Kepler mission, as it is sure to yield some fascinating results. I just won't read the final report though.

For most people, the very idea of searching for planets orbiting other stars can be quite exciting. Even more so if this search includes, as one of its primary objectives, looking for other inhabitable Earths. This is the subject of this book and the author has done a superb job of conveying this excitement to the interested reader. The book includes some of the history of this field as well as an up-to-the-minute update on what has been found thus far and what projects are being planned for the future. Since several of these projects involve sending instruments into space, the politics and finances associated with space-related projects is extensively discussed. Some of the science is briefly described and the principles of operation of some of the devices, e.g., interferometers, have been largely left out. Consequently, a reader interested in a more in-depth look at the related science and technology would need to look elsewhere. The book contains many useful diagrams, although none of them are directly referred to in the main text. Also, the captions for many of the plots that were reproduced from scientific publications run a bit short on explaining the quantities represented by the axes. Nevertheless, the author succeeds admirably in communicating the rollercoaster ride of emotional swings involved - from the elation of discovering a new planet to the agony of learning that funding previously awarded for an important project has been either reduced or cancelled. The writing style is clear, friendly, very authoritative and quite engaging. Although general readers can learn a lot from this book, especially on how science works, it is likely that science buffs would appreciate it the most.

I had high hopes for this book but it is a boring, self-congratulatory day-by-day, week-by-week diary of the many projects of which he apparently has personal knowledge. In several places, Boss leaps into the world of politics and makes no bones about his views - he's an obvious left-winger who believes the Federal Government should fund whatever he wants, when he wants it. His attacks on the Bush administration (and love of Al Gore) will make me rethink ever buying another one of his books.

Great book, a fun history of the discovery of other planets around distance stars. Sometimes heavy with the politics but it does not get in the way of the story.

All I was going to do was skim this book for summary concepts, but the way this book was presented made that difficult to do. It comes off more as a play by play of the past 15 years of astronomers searching for planets in the universe.