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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
First rate science and reflection, July 6, 2010
This review is from: How It Ends: From You to the Universe (Hardcover)
Have you ever wondered how life will end? Chris Impey has and this book provides some interesting answers and reflection. If you're an American or a citizen of another developed nation, your life will probably end as a result of cancer or heart disease. But don't be expecting to make it to 100 or more unless that's in your family history. From the individual, Impey glides gently into our future as a species. Here is very helpfully guided by some great insight including from J. Richard Gott. Though Gott is a physicist, he's also a great thinker and in his book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe Gott came up with what he called the Copernican principle which says that if we're seeing something, odds are we're not in a very privileged position. To be more clear, the Copernican principle posits that if we want to predict the future duration of a thing we assume that we are either observing that thing 2.5 percent into its life or more than 2.5 percent before it's demise. In this way, Gott predicts humanity will last at least another five thousand years and maybe as many as another 11 million years. Of course, our fate is bound up with that of our planet and our biosphere. Here Impey draws on great insight from the likes of Peter Ward whose 2000 book Rare Earth shocked the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Community by suggesting that Earth, and intelligent life along with it, might not just be rare but maybe even close to one of a kind. In terms of the future, what that means is that all the things that frustrate the emergence of life elsewhere might contribute to the likelihood of its demise here. In this regard, Impey gives very thorough descriptions of verious forms of celestial threats to our planet from asteroid impact to solar flares. Spoiler alert: Our biggest threat aside from ourselves is probably from asteroids. Beyond Earth, Impey discusses the time frames of natural solar demise and of the possible eventual fate of creation itself. Along the way, Impey is a fun accessible guide and a great teacher. As mentioned, he relies on great resources and provides very excellent food for thought. I highly recommend this book!
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not a happy end but a peaceful one, September 28, 2010
This review is from: How It Ends: From You to the Universe (Hardcover)
I read this book during a travel through Europe. I began to read it in London and finished it in Rome, a rainy day but -fortunately- not the last one. As Steve Reina concludes in a previous review, Chris Impey is a very good teacher and as a very good one he is not emphatic but persuasive and extremely inspirer. What you get here is a perspective of our lives in relation with a life which is bigger, very much bigger than ours. Thus, the origin and the end of the universe is linked with our human existence so that you can experience both the tension and the extension of the rope. Therefore if everything takes part of the same source that vivificates the whole universe, then -anyway- everything is living and dying at different rates and without exceptions. So as long as you leave behind the statistics in the first chapters about how we die today you are invited in the followings to see what is going to happen with our sun, our solar system, our galaxy and -last but not least- our universe. In this particular moment you realize that this book was not a matter of comfort or solace, or a guide to a better living or a revelation about how to face the death penalty we all carry on our backs. It was not about that, it was about a possibility of looking the whole thing as a show. You are invited to see the big show of the very big ending, comfortably seated in London, Paris, Rome or wherever, before the telephone begin to ring or your kids begin to cry. If you take a look at the table of contents you would say, what? "Beyond natural selection, The sun's demise, Aging of the Milky Way, How the universe ends..." among others. The clarity and delicacy that Impey puts in presenting you the different topics doesn't sound like a physician telling you that you got cancer but just the opposite, i.e., that everything is o.k., despite the symptoms... I highly recommend this book because it face a very hard theme in a very soft time. It is not a movie, it is science doing what science do better: to say what the facts are and what should we know about them. At the very end, afterwards Impey has told you what should happen AFTER the end in the last chapter ("Beyond endings") you realize the meaning and the reason behind the name of the chapter one. In this sense this is a gift from an astronomer who has been watching the sky for several years to you, an unoccupied reader who walks down the streets under a worryng (and not so much sheltering) sky.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Science & Good Writing--what a concept!, October 20, 2011
Hard to believe a book about extinctions -- ours, the world's, the universe--could be such a page-turner! Impey is a terrific writer and approaches the topic of 'ending' with both sobriety and humor.
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