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Here Be Dragons: The Scientific Quest for Extraterrestrial Life

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This book's been on my shopping list for a while, so I was delighted to find it while strolling through a small bookstore in downtown Astoria. I put it in my shopping bag, along with "The Search for Life on Mars," (Malcolm Walker, Perseus Books, 1999). This is the sort of book that almost anyone with an interest in science and/or astronomy will enjoy. It's easy reading, and doesn't really require any prerequisite knowledge.

The book isn't about dragons. It's about the scientific search for extraterrestrial life. The title's taken from a phrase used by old cartographers to indicate unexplored regions of the earth. The play on words, obviously, is that the search for extraterrestrial life takes us into uncharted territory.

"Here be dragons" is a little like "Rare earth," (Ward, Brownlee, Copernicus press, 2000) with a different slant, and a different opinion held by the authors. While Ward and Brownlee are of the opinion that intelligent life is extremely rare in the universe, Koerner and LeVay tend toward the opinion that "...the resulting pressures [of evolution] may commonly foster a trend toward complexification and the ability to react and learn." In line with the hopes of SETI, Koerner and LeVay are of the opinion that "intelligence and technology is common in the galaxy." They find the Fermi Paradox (if intelligence were common in the galaxy, where are the extraterrestrials) "poorly conceived," though they admit their views may be grounded in faith as much as in reason.

The book's flow is both logical and predictable. It begins by describing the theories of the origin of life on earth, including hyperthermophiles and life at the extreme, near mid-ocean vents and hot springs. There's a brief review of Stanley Miller's experiment in the 50's, and how he synthesized many important organic compounds by simulating what he thought, at the time, was a realistic approximation of earth's early atmosphere. But our understanding of the early atmosphere has changed since then, and it looks like the experiment Miller performed doesn't match atmospheric conditions, as we understand them today. This has led scientists to look at other possibilities for the origin of life. For example, organic compounds have been found in space, so there is some speculation that the initial ingredients for life might have been extraterrestrial. Also, recent evidence suggests that our earliest common ancestors were hyperthermophiles, so deep-sea vents may be where life first arose.

Recent discoveries of the extreme conditions in which life exists on earth has led to new speculation about its possible existence on other planets. Mars, for example, might harbor life today, deep under ground (as it is found on earth). During a warmer and wetter past, Mars might even have supported life on its surface.

Throughout the book, the authors act as scientific investigative reporters. They use the book to teach, but also to give a representative view of what different scientists and researchers in various fields are doing. Ordinarily, I'd prefer to see authors be a little more forceful in presenting an idea or opinion, and then working to defend it. But the situation with Koerner and LeVay is different. Exobiology, unlike other branches of science, is one in which the principal subject of research has not been shown to exist. The field is so new that speculation and widely divergent opinions abound. In view of this state of flux, I think it's particularly valuable for their book to sample the broader spectrum of ideas.

After describing the conditions under which life arose on earth, and how it might exist on other planets, the authors proceed to describe the direction of evolution. The point of this discussion is whether evolution has any tendency toward greater levels of complexity, and specifically whether it drives toward the evolution of beings intelligent enough to build a radio transmitter. They sample the opinions of three scientists: Simon Conway Morris, Stephen Jay Gould, and Stuart Kauffman. While these scientists share common ground, they also draw different conclusions and place emphasis in different ways. Personally, I think Stephen Jay Gould comes closest to the truth. It seems obvious to me that the chances of finding intelligence on other planets (where "intelligence" means being able to design and build a system that can communicate with earth) is about as likely as finding a woodpecker (an example used in the book) or an elephant. Humans - in spite of the inflated opinion we have of ourselves - are not the end product of evolution. Our species represents a single point in a morphological phase space of nearly infinite expanse. While I suspect there are strange attractors in this space, it seems less than obvious to me that intelligence (of the sort possessed by humans) is so close to one of these strange attractors as to ensure its evolution during the lifetime of a given planet.

The authors have a pretty interesting chapter on SETI, as well as one about science and the religion of UFOs. They end the book with some exotic extrapolations and speculation of life on other planets, complete with philosophical discussions about cosmology, the anthropic principle, many worlds, multiple universes, and a whole bunch of other subjects that are as easily tossed about by novices and experts, alike.

The book is sparsely illustrated, with an ample index and extensive list of additional reading material. It's well written, easy to read, and entertaining. It's pure speculation (of course) about what we shall find of extraterrestrial life. The real scientific value is in its descriptions of the origin of life on earth, aspects of evolution, and the way it sets the mind to wondering.

This is a fairly episodic overview of the title topic, with each chapter covering a different aspect. Chapter One is about the origins of life on earth. Chapter Two is about extremophiles, those strange bacteria that lurk around hotspots in the ocean and cold spots under the Antarctic. Chapter Three focuses on the possibility of life on Mars, past or present. Chapter Four covers the discovery of organic molecules in space and other astronomical factors that may induce or prevent life. Chapter Five talks about the discovery of planets around other stars. Chapter Six follows up Chapter One and talks about evolution and whether intelligent life is inevitable given enough time or a pure happenstance. Chapter Seven covers the current search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Chapter Eight is a lightweight treatment of UFO proponents-those who think that the aliens have already arrived. Chapter Nine discusses the possibility for "life as we don't know it": the silicon-based life forms of Star Trek and science fiction fame, among others. Chapter Ten delves into cosmology and the controversial notion that the universe is uniquely suited to life, either by design, a strange form of cosmic evolution, or the existence of multiple universes.

As you can see, there's an awful lot of hopping around, making the book more like an anthology of magazine articles than an integrated whole. Still, one has to admire the authors for even attempting to cover all the bases on the subject and not just focusing on, say, SETI, as many similar books do.

Given that, the book is interesting and well-written, bringing up a lot of good topics. Chapters One and Six, in particular, provided a worthwhile counterpoint to the book Rare Earth, which I also read recently. Highly recommended for those interested in the subject.

What I especially liked about Here Be Dragons was how every chapter was interesting. Beginning with "Origins," about possible habitats for life from scum ponds to interstellar dust clouds to deep sea ocean vents in Chapter 2 to the evolution of solar systems in Chapter 4 to the search for life beyond the sun, the SETI experience, the UFO phenomena (in a chapter entitled "Dreamland") to the possibility of non carbon-based life in Chapter 9: "Exotica: Life as We Don't Know It," the text is lively. (Chapter 3 is about "The Incredible Shrinking Martians" who have, alas, lost their canals and greenery.)

Koerner and LeVay achieve this engaging readability by presenting contrasting viewpoints from state of the art scientists, often in disagreement. Thus we have paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris disagreeing on how big a factor chance is in evolution, and how that might affect the prospects for the development of extraterrestrial intelligence. Frank Drake and the late Carl Sagan, who are optimistic about the possibility of contacting ETI, are paired off against people like Jared Diamond, Ben Zuckerman, Ernst Mayr, and Martin Ryle, who are not.

Other books about science try to be interesting by presenting the personalities of science, but what they miss is the conflicts. Koerner and LeVay do not. They even begin the book with a visit to the Museum of Creation and Earth History in Santee, California with its Six Days of Creation exhibits (the Darwinian fish on their vehicle hopefully not noticed). They immediately contrast this with a visit to the nearby NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training in Exobiology at La Jolla. Additionally, they sprinkle the narrative with some interesting, sometimes irreverent, observations. For example on pages 162-163 they toss in a witty jab at Stephen Gould, a brilliant man who sometimes takes himself a little too seriously. At issue is the famous (and beloved) Drake equation. The authors write: "‛It's not an equation,' Stephen Gould tells us baldly, adding his trademark chuckle to let us know that he has finally put the thing out of its misery." At another point they tell us that Frank Drake's license plate reads, "N EQLS L," which is Drake's emphatic way of asserting his belief that we are not alone.

Truthfully, though, some of this was a little over my head, in particular the material about planet-finding techniques, including the photometric method, the radial-velocity method and interferometry. I don't think that's a shortcoming of the book, but rather a shortcoming on my part. However it didn't help that the color plates are misnumbered. (Perhaps in the paperback edition that is fixed.) Also difficult, but interesting, was the material about Stuart Kauffman's "autocatalytic sets" of replicating molecules as precursors of RNA and DNA.

I want to say one thing about the anthropic principle addressed in Chapter 9. We have a sampling of one. A sampling of one is better than no sampling at all. In fact the difference between no sampling at all and one sampling is greater than the difference between samplings one and two, and two and three...etc. It means something, believe it. We're here. That implies that the universe had to be a certain way, which excludes a whole bunch of presumably possible universes. But if the universe were different perhaps some other creatures would be (t)here rhapsodizing over just how miraculous all their coincidences are. To get all thrilled about how everything in the universe had to be exactly so otherwise we wouldn't have arrived is like getting all thrilled at bridge because you were dealt exactly the cards you were dealt since the odds against getting exactly those thirteen individual cards are astronomical.

I also like the tone of "Here Be Dragons" (from the cartographers of old), which is midway between dead earnestness and TGIF casual. The prose is lively and witty and very readable while being informative in an exciting way. I suspect a lot of hard work went into making this a book that the general public could get a lot out of. I know I did.

Science at its best reads like a detective story. Authors David Koerner and Simon LeVay certainly convey this feeling in their wide-ranging overview of the search for ETs in the universe. Even in our solar system life might exist outside Earth. Europa, one of the moons of Jupitor, might possess an icecovered ocean. With all the right ingredients for life down in a dark ocean. Another likely candidate is the Saturn moon Titan. Even though it seems a pretty cold place at minus 178 degress Celcius. In its atmosphere one is likely to find amino acids, nucleotide bases and many other building blocks of life. All of which is thoroughly described by Koerner and Levay in an easy and engaging way.

And surely a lot of the other stars must have planets. In a little treat of a chapter authors Koerner and Levay makes the case for stars with planets. Some of them with life on them. That is life as we know it. Still a number of other possibilities (infinite ?) exists.

Without goning into the details of the examples in the book - one possibility in particular excites me. And I think they should have dwelled more on it than they actually do: Take life on an neutron star. A neutron star is the superdense remnant of a supernova explosion. The original star collapses to a state were gravity overcomes repulsion between electrons and protons. They then fuses forming a sea of neutrons. Life there could exists as patterns of bounded neutrons. With a breakneck speed of metabolism. Where organism live and die within 10e-15 seconds. Entire civilisations might be formed within a fraction of second. Advanced civilisation might create such neutron stars in order to use them as computers. Some 10e30 time more powerful than the human brain. The authors regrettablely stops here - I think it could be relevant to speculate further on installing computers in spacetime itself, just taking the neutron star example one step further to a black hole, that explodes into a new universe (big bang) with the order (computer) installed in its very fabric of space time.

Still the book "Here be dragons" is highly recomended as it takes on all the interesting questions: Who are we ? Where do we come from ? Are we alone ? and let you in on the detective story of finding some answers. -Simon

In Here Be Dragons, Koerner & Levay take us on a journey through the quest for extraterrestrial life. Filled with interesting comments and interviews with researchers in a myriad of fields, this book gives a great overview of the most current research. Discussions include how life began on earth, SETI, the search for extra-solar planets, how evolution might lead to complex organisms, speculations on life as we don't know it, and cosmology and the anthropic principle. Find out what current researchers are thinking, where we might go with this search and learn some astounding facts from astronomy and biology that might lead you to believe that life might be common after all. All this information was presented in a well written and easy to understand format. I found the discussions on the origin of life particularly illuminating. Also, the sections on recent findings in astronomy were fascinating. The book was worth getting because it contained alot of info I haven't seen elsewhere. The only part of the book I didn't like were the first 4 or 5 pages that discuss a visit to a creationism museum.

Like several other books on extraterrestrial life and intelligence, this one surveys habitats and requirements for life, the nature of evolution, the evolution of the solar system and the search for life there, searching for life beyond our solar system, the modern scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, possible exotic forms of life including machine intelligence, the Anthropic Principle, and UFOs. Here Be Dragons stands out from the others because it is interestingly written, with numerous well-chosen quotes from scientists. The book includes a few color plates and black and white illustrations.

Koerner and LeVay conclude that the search will be rewarded, and soon. One wishes that they had offered more speculations about what would happen after contact.

This book takes its title from a medieval cartographic convention: in regions of unmapped ocean, mapmakers would draw a serpent with the legend "HIC SVNT DRACONES." The authors (one a biologist, the other an astronomer) choose this symbol, I think, to underscore the very speculative nature of the scientific quest for extraterrestrial life: students of the subject have what scientists call "N of 1," i.e., only one example of life in one place, biased further by the fact that we need life to have arisen on Earth in order for us to be sitting in our armchairs on Earth, speculating on the existence of life on other worlds. Given this, what do we really know? The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is that we know quite a bit: about the evolution of planetary systems, the physical and chemical requirements for life (in particular, that these parameters are broader than one might have suspected a decade ago); we even have strong reason to believe that spontaneous origin of life is quite likely, given that the Earth has apparently been host to living things for almost its entire existence as a planetary body. The authors' treatment of "exobiology" (the extension of terrestrial biology to speculation about the nature of life elsewhere), as well as their discussion of the recent discovery of massive planets revolving around nearby stars (and the prospects for direct imaging of these bodies in the near future) are superlative if somewhat elementary from the perspective of a professional scientist, and are definitely worth reading. The (only) major weakness I could find was in an omission: while the authors do discuss radio SETI, they don't attempt to describe the astronomical difficulties of communicating via radio frequencies with distant receivers whose exact location in space is not known, and therefore might tend to mislead the reader into believing that radio contact with extraterrestrials is just a small matter of spending a few million dollars to build an array of telescopes. Iin reality, something like the entire energy output of the Earth would be required to send reasonably (i.e., detectably) powerful signals to wide enough sections of the sky that we might reasonably expect to hit the relevant targets -- there was a great article about this in the June or July 2000 "Scientific American." This objection notwithstanding, this is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn about the state of the art in the modern search for ET life, and most likely an excellent gift for that stargazing friend of yours who watches every shuttle launch with enthusiasm and a touch of envy.

I have been looking for something along this line for some time - a summation of the current thinking in the scientific world on the subject of extraterrestrial life. The authors approach the problem two ways. First is a description of the various sciences involved, then an examination of conflicting viewpoints by leading scientists.

As the authors state, when one speaks of Extraterrestrial Life the underlying meaning is INTELLIGENT life - not microbes, bacteria or even insects. But since all current life evolved from microbes the authors correcly examine the most basic issues - what is life and how did it arise on Earth? They then asked if Earth's example was unique or common. Along the way we discover new schools of thought challenging traditional views of evolution, organic matter in space, carbon-based life and the wonder of water. In a more philosophical vein, the authors tackle subjectivity in science, the deeper meaning of quantum theory and finally, our own future. The discussions on the factors that made life necessary on Earth (large moon, large outer planets, right distance from the right kind of star, etc) are not new but were integrated with the rest of the story.

The one disappointment - and perhaps this is not the province of this book - was lack of discussion on consciousness. When we speak of intelligence, consciousness is implied. Yes, it would be nice to find a planet rich with microbes, better yet animal life. But unless true intelligence existed, our quest would not be considered complete. I have serious doubts about SETI (due to the increasingly rapid changes of our own techology)and even the existence of intelligent life elsewhere because of the uniqueness of conciousness which is not a result of "getting smarter" but something much more profound, something...human. A wonderful, sobering text.

The book presents, chapter after chapter, the points of view of differents scientists (and a few pseudo-scientists) on the subject of life: its nature, definition, origin, rules, etc. The underlying subject is extraterrestrial life, but, in order to discuss it properly, the text does not focus on SETI only, for example, but asks renowed biologists, mathematicians, roboticists and Artificial Life experts what their work about life is all about.

You end up with a very well written text, that gives some speech-time to everyone, including (regrettably, IMHO) creationnists and ufologists.

Funny thing: in the end, you probably still won't know what life is!

In the confusions of the Darwin debate it can be useful to change key and consider the perspective of the exobiologists. Suddenly the certainties of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis become questions all over again as we ask what is the relation of terrestrial evolution to a greater cosmological context. Suddenly we can realize that, so far, it all doesn't add up. Is life universal, is it a cosmological process, what is the origin of life, and is it 'inevitable', and so on. We are suddenly confronted with the question as to whether evolution could really be the spectacle of pure randomness that we are led to believe. Surveying the whole field with interviews of Stuart Kauffman and Stephen J. Gould, this book is a cogent introduction to the subject of evolution from a broader perspective than the usual, this quite beyond its excellent presentation of many other topics and issues, from life on Mars to the Seti project. Cf. also, Rare Earth, by Peter Ward;