Customer Reviews

Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book offers a detailed look at the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System. Ward starts off examining how life got started on Earth, in order to understand how it could get started elsewhere. He comes across as very knowledgable on the subject and gives a very interesting survey of the various theories and their problems. His discussion of how life can hitchhike on meteors is very convincing, as he demolishes the objections one by one. He discusses all the possible types of 'alien life', including some I had never encountered before. He then looks at Mars, Europa, Titan and the upper atmosphere of Venus as the most likely abodes of life.

Overall, this is a very good book. Peter Ward packs a lot of information into a moderately sized book and does so in a very readable fashion. I found this book hard to put down. He also scores some definite hits: his speculation that viruses not only qualify as life (a somewhat controversial point) but also are representatives of the earliest type of life, with cellular life coming later, (a very controversial point) has been bolstered by recent research, including the discovery of a super virus with more genes than the simplest bacteria. His suggestion that the Moon is a source of pristine fossiles from early Earth, Mars and Venus via meteor transfer (an incredible 2% of the rocks on the Moon are believed to have originated elsewhere) provides a real justification for returning there.

On the other hand, Ward has a tendency to make claims he can't, or doesn't, prove. His off-hand claim to have solved the cause of the Permian/Triassic extinction (by far the worst on record) would be disputed by most scientists in the field, who consider the question still open. His dismissal of the possibility of life in the atmosphere of Jovian planets would be more convincing if he explained why the lack of iron was a show-stopper. He also claims that ammonia has been found in the Martian atmosphere, something categorically denied by the ESA; a demonstration of why you don't treat unsubstantiated rumor as fact.

Perhaps the most annoying part to me is the bibliography. Ward does not footnote every assertion, not unreasonable in a popular book, but for many of the more interesting or controversial points, there is no reference in the bibliography. This leaves the reader stuck with either accepting Ward's statements as gospel or having to do a lot of research to doublecheck them.

So, not a perfect book, but still a very strong one. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.

I am a big fan of GWCW [Geologists Who Can Write] and Peter Ward is at the top of that list. Most of Ward's books deal with paleontology, Earth history, evolution, and extinction, but many readers know him mainly from his [in]famous [and often misunderstood] book Rare Earth coauthored with Don Brownlee. Life As We Do Not Know It brings us up to date on the search for [and synthesis of] alien life. In several places in the book, Ward goes way out on a limb [of the Tree of Life] and proposes several new levels in the taxonomy of life. We also get a tour of what we might find on other planetary bodies in our solar system. Life As We Do Not Know It is not as well written as Ward's other books [such as On Methuselah's Trail, Rare Earth, or Future Evolution] and therefore I must rank it 4 stars, but still recommend it highly to anyone interested in astrobiology and the study of life in general.

Ward is at his best when making statements that are based on the best and latest studies in molecular biology, evolutionary biology and related fields, such as classifying viruses as living.

He's about as good when conjecturing that in other ways, we may have too limited a view of what constitutes life here on Earth.

He combines this with his paleontologist's knowledge of geography to say that we ... especially "we" being folks like NASA, SETI, etc., may have way too narrow of a view of what constitutes life on other planets, and just what "alien" life may involve.

But, from here, he goes into the unwarranted generalizations.

First, even allowing for the diversity of alien types of life, I think he is unempirically and irrationally optimistic about the existence of life elsewhere in our solar system. The amount of methane on Mars or Titan may be due neither to extant life nor volcanism, contrary to his possibly false dichotomy, for example.

Also, his souped-up overhaul of cladistics, with new classification levels above that of kingdom, have a bit of horn-tooting at times.

From these two observations, it's not too far to Point C, as in, "Look at me! I'm on the cutting edge of astrobiology!"

And, along with other reviewers, I'd have to agree with observations on the paucity of footnotes. Frankly, this seems connected with Point C.

Finally, as a paleontologist, he has some non sequiturs about manned space exploration. He seems to blithely assume that humans can survive longer solar system trips, dodging bullets of cosmic radiation. However, recent research has indicated even a manned trip to Mars could be fraught with peril, not to mention his lusted-after visit to Titan.

I was on the borderline of a fourth star, based on the good points, but I'm sure that someone else will come on with a more sober, and more in-depth, coverage of this fascinating topic soon enough.

I have mixed feelings about this book, as do a couple other people. On the plus side, I think Ward does bring to the lay public an interesting subject that for the most part is explained fairly well. Moreover, I like his attempt at making more general biological classifications beyond the Life We Do Know. On the negative side, however, I do agree that his lack of documentation is frustrating, his style is too breezy, and his organization could have been improved just a tad. This book is definitely worth a read, but I don't know that I'd be willing to pay the price for such a thin (in more ways than one) volume. And, in fact, I didn't; I checked it out from a library and I suggest you do as well. Meanwhile, I would normally give this book three or four stars, but I'm giving it only two as a protest against the author's unethical act of reviewing and rating his own work! Boo! Hiss! Just take it like a man, good and bad.

Two of the three deep questions about life, "What is life and how should it be defined?" are addressed in this book along with "Where might life be found?" Peter Ward and his colleague Don Brownlee addressed the third deep question, "Does life tend to evolve into intelligent life?" in their controversial book Rare Earth and came to the unpopular conclusion that intelligent life is very rare, and that overwhelmingly the vast preponderance of life in the universe is microbial. Here Ward concentrates on the possibility of microbial life in the solar system.

Let's look at Professor Ward's goals in writing this book as presented in the preface. His first goal is "to bring the public up to date on the progress in...astrobiology..."

Understandably Ward does not venture beyond the friendly (or not so friendly) confines of the solar system. Influenced as we all are by the recent discoveries of extremophiles in unlikely places on earth, Ward waxes hopeful about the possibility of microbial life under the surface of Mars, is less enthusiastic about life in the ocean under the ice cap of Europa, is pessimistic about life in the Venusian atmosphere, and is almost wildly excited about the possibility of life on the far-off Saturn moon, Titan, where he believes life could be especially exotic.

Interestingly enough Ward thinks there is alien life on earth yet to be discovered, possibly descendants of ancient RNA life. He classifies viruses as being alive and concludes, somewhat whimsically, that alien life does exist on earth since viruses are not included in the family tree of life as defined by most biologists. (One notes in passing that Richard Dawkins's recent tome The Ancestor's Tale does not include any viruses.)

I was uplifted and mostly convinced from Ward's analysis that life does indeed exist on Mars. (Yes!) Ward claims that some scientists now consider it a given, and he even hints darkly that NASA knows this (p. 189) but is keeping mum until they can present a stronger case to the public.

His second goal is "to redefine...life...." Here I am confident that other scientists will find both his grasp and reach exceeded, but I suspect his attempt to reclassify the tree of life will be a harbinger of reclassifications to come. It is here that he is at his most quixotic.

His third goal is "a rational look at what alien life might be like." He looks at life based on something other than DNA and the familiar twenty amino acids. He looks at silicone life. He looks at how life might have originated, going from "warm ponds" to clay substrates to hydrothermal vents to artificially created life.

This leads him to his fourth goal which is to speculate on how likely it is that life could arise and exist in the extreme environments elsewhere in the solar system based on the latest information. I found this part of the book intriguing and optimistic.

Ward urges us to send manned missions to both Mars and Titan because he believes that only space boots on the ground and instruments in gloved hands can best find the aliens he believes live there. Ward also makes the excellent point that only on the relatively unchanging surfaces of the moon and Mars we are likely to find evidence of early life on earth! This is because chunks of our planet flew into space and landed on the moon and Mars from a time not preserved in the geological record on earth because of weathering, etc. He even suggests that fossils of microbial life could exist in earth rocks on the moon and Mars.

There are some minuses in this book. It is not as well written or edited as his previous works. Sometimes it is the case that once a writer becomes as successful as Ward has become, editors are afraid to actually edit, and the writer himself does not read the proofs as carefully as he might. Too bad.

Another minus is his confused expression about the allocation of public funds for SETI as opposed to funds for exploring the solar system. I think Ward ought to say unequivocally that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the exploration of the solar system are both worthy projects that ought to receive strong support from the public. On pages 238-239 Ward actually makes fun of how humanity would benefit from a signal from intelligent extraterrestrial life. What he fails to appreciate is the deep philosophic and religious implications of such a signal. He also fails to realize that even though it may take anywhere from nine to fifty to a hundred years or more, depending on where the signal is coming from, for a stream of information to flow our way, that is still a wondrous prospect for humanity. Ward seems blithely unaware that contact of any kind from an extraterrestrial civilization would be one of the greatest events in human history. His conclusion that after such a signal we would discover that "nothing has changed" is...well, I hate to use the word "stupid" but in this case I think it really does apply.

I also didn't care for Ward's little story (pp. 236-237) about trying to give a copy of his book Rare Earth to Microsoft billionaire John Allen only to be embarrassed by SETI scientist Jill Tartar's understandable reaction. Nor did I like his making fun of Carl Sagan's now obviously unwarranted enthusiasm for macroscopic Martian life (pp. 176-179) and his later obsequious praise of the popular scientist (e.g., p. 233).

This is one of those books--Ward's 13th--that historians love because it unintentionally reveals so much about its author and his times. It's a bit breezy, a bit arrogant, and a bit quixotic, but this somewhat brazen report from the infancy of astrobiology is nonetheless an interesting and worthwhile effort.

Have you always suspected that Star Trek's "beings of pure energy" were in fact pure bunk? After reading this book, you'll understand why you were probably right.

Life as We Do Not Know It is a courageous exploration of some of the latest ideas in astrobiology, and a vehicle for Peter Ward to push some of his fairly ground-shaking ideas--mainly about reimagining the tree of life. Reading his book has solidified some of my own reached opinions regarding life, especially how common it is in the universe (hint: there may be as many trees of life in the universe as there are stars).

Get ready for a new level of hierarchy, as Ward introduces Dominion Terroa, Dominion Ribosa and others, above the currently accepted highest level domains. Terroa contains all three known domains of earth life: archaea, bacteria, and eukaryota. Ribosa contains viruses, which Ward convincinlgy argues should be considered living, and the (probably) extinct cellular RNA life.

He goes on to apply these new concepts to the flood of new information recently coming in from the solar system. Mars, Europa and Titan get special treatment, with brand new perspectives and a few surprises for this well-read science and astronomy buff.

Much of the book was peppered with inexcusable grammatical errors and omissions, sometimes seeming to come as often as every page. There were two or three sharp and unexpected barbs aimed at President George W. Bush, dropped in whenever the text ventured near enough, which might bother some readers. But not this one. None of these things detracted from the book in a serious way, and I doubt you could find a more enlightening, current, and grounded book on astrobiology and the origin of life.

Not long ago, Peter Ward, with co-author Donald Brownlee, scandalised the SciFi world. In "Rare Earth", they assessed the contingencies that would lead to complex and intelligent life and found all those ET types seriously wanting. Too many binocular, bipedal and articulate organisms for their liking. "Alien" life, however, is very likely to exist in Ward's analysis in this successor volume. Indeed, he stresses, it may be very close. Alien life using survival methods we have little or no knowledge of, may have emerged in parallel with ours. We need to accept that possibility and learn to search for and identify it.

Viruses, of course, are the prime candidates. Many biologists, however, reject the virus as part of life - they cannot reproduce without a host, and their genetic information is limited, usually to RNA instead of the DNA underlying the life we understand. Another "alien" life form - many of them, actually - have been found surrounding the "black smokers" at the bottom of the seas. Living entirely without sunlight, at temperatures that would annihilate surface life, they metabolise sulphur instead of oxygen, they violate every standard definition of life. Or did until they were discovered. Today, they are leading candidates to represent how life originated on this planet. For Ward, more than just their novelty, the organisms around the black smokers demonstrate how life can exist in extreme environments.

"What does chemistry permit?" he asks, and spends the remainder of the book providing answers to that query. He reminds us that life on our planet has had nearly four billion years to experiment with conceiving life forms. How many attempts of various types have started? How many of succeeded? Charles Darwin, Ward says, laid down "an iron-clad doctrine that all life on Earth comes from a single ancestor". Yet Darwin knew nothing of genetics, black smokers or "extremophile" life. Ward, in keeping with taxonomic rules, wants to establish a new division of classification: Terroan life. He rests this proposal on three aspects of life: the time it has had to develop new forms, the wide variety of those forms and the almost astounding number being newly discovered. All of which leaves aside the numbers to emerge - even those made by us.

Ward's chapter on "The Artificial Synthesis of Life" is certain to chain any reader's attention. Strides made in this field are, to put it mildly, compelling. Genetics researcher Jack Szostak, who figures large in this chapter, has estimated that a DNA-based life form could be achieved for about US$20 million - a paltry sum. Using the famous Urey-Miller experiment in the 1950s that produced amino acids, Ward moves on to note how important a membrane is to allow organisation and complexity to fulfill what the Urey-Miller experiment started. Ward argues that the "bottom-up" method, starting with basics is preferable to trying to create a new DNA-based organism. "Self-assembly" of the proper compounds is more promising. His DNA forecast notwithstanding, it is here that Jack Szostak is the stellar figure. The author outlines in detail the issues surrounding the formation of RNA in an organic envelope.

From the origins of life here, and the attempts to start it anew in the lab, Ward moves into a more familiar realm. As a major figure in the NASA Astrobiology Institute, Ward and many of the figures mentioned in the book are refining the search for extra-terrestrial life. Mars, of course, is a tempting possibility, but the permanent drought there is likely to inhibit easily detectable forms. Jupiter's moon Europa has been a tantalizing candidate for some time. Since probes passing by showed the possibility of an under-ice ocean, the extremophile concept has been projected there. Ward's own favourite, however, is the methane-laden satellite of Saturn, Titan. Larger than other moons, it holds great promise for the possibility than truly alien organisms might be found there. His final chapter: "Send Paleontologists to Mars and Biochemists to Titan", spells out his manifesto perfectly.

The book is a rich trove of information about life, updated from the earlier "Rare Earth" in many respects. The bibliography is rich with up-to-date [at least at time of publication] information on the latest research. The book is valuable now and will remain so until new probes reach the planets, satellites, and comets of our solar system. And until Jack Szostak and others finally achieve full synthesis of RNA in the laboratory [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

To understand just how rare life is we need first to understand how rare matter is.

If the sun were shrunk to the size of an orange, the Earth would be represented by an object less than the size of a grain of sand and even that grain of sand would be some 20 kilometers from the orange.

This mental exercise shows dramatically that empty space is overwhelmingly comprised of, well, empty space. (Actual the space isn't technically completely empty but the model still gives some idea of the relative sizes and distances we're talking about here.)

Now life, among all those oranges and grains of sand is even rarer.

According to Ward prudent speculation would have it that perhaps it may only have existed on Mars (and even at that over three billion years ago) and may only currently exist on Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons.

In laying out his case, Ward says some interesting and important things about the nature of life.

First he asks a question unhelpfully asked by philosophers but more recently and much more meaningfully asked by the likes of Erwin Shroedinger (in his 1944 masterwork What is Life?) and by University of Adelaide's Paul Davies (in his msterwork, The Fifth Miracle):

What is life? After noting that its constituent ingredients and tendency to survive and reproduce, Ward notes that life is autonomous.

Wisely, he kicks the door open on the idea that life as we do not know it may have different constituent elements on other planets or biospheres (like the moon Titan or perhaps even a comet). It may be silicon based. It may live off amonia. It may even not use a DNA like coding system.

For one used the traditional optimism of popular science books vis a vis the possibility ubiquity of life (Carl Sagan even demanded that Viking have nightlights so as not to miss out on nocturnal Martian life), Ward's commonsense approach to the issues he deals with is refreshing.

Let's take the Earth as a for instance. Until 600 million years ago, one would be hard pressed to find life here without a microscope (though admittedly the oxygen content of the atmosphere among other phenomenon would provide their own clues). And in terms of intelligent life, even clothing only dates back but a million years...less than three tenths of one percent of the age of the planet. City-states and animal domestication (e.g. the domestication of dogs) date back about ten to fifteen thousand years. And needless to say, the modern industrial age itself only dates back two hundred years.

So even here, on this planet, multicellular life and intelligent life have ranged from rare to exceedingly rare.

Being a fair reporter Ward candidly admits that not only may he be wrong in his observations but he would like to be wrong in them as well.

But regardless his ultimate suggestions that we explore Mars for its history and Titan for its present are well supported and worthy considering.

Whether life is or is not ultimately common we do not now know. But we can be certain that regardless of how that question is answered, it will have enormous consequences for us.

For those whose interest is piqued by this book I would suggest the Shroedinger and Davies books I mentioned earlier as well Shapiro's Origins and yes Carl Sagan's Cosmos too. Though admittedly I am sensitive to all of Ward's reasoning, no one ever made me see the stars like Carl Sagan.

Pluses: The well organized structure of the book; the way it manages to convey the gist of complex scientific ideas to lay people who, like me, have absolutely no training in any science; the author's very well thought out arguments for the reclassification of life categories and the re-definition of what is alive and what is not; the excellent case that is made for a more energetic exploration of the solar system.

Minuses: The arguments against SETI. The author admits that the amount of money used in military concerns is appallingly larger than that invested in the exploration of the solar system, and that the money necessary for such exploration is in turn billions of dollars, compared to the millions required by SETI. He then mentions the urgency of social and environmental problems on Earth, but nevertheless finds (very valid) arguments to support his project. SETI instead, in spite of its much lower economic costs, he puts down. On the whole, his arguments against this program seem unconvincing and of dubious motivation (funding and/or personal rivalries? That is the impression transmitted by the book).

The concept of extinction did not exist until the nineteenth century. Until then there was no sense that species evolved, lived for a time, and then went extinct. Because religion still held sway over so much of the world, there was a sense that everything God had ever created would still be found - somewhere.

- Peter Ward "Life as We Do Not Know It"

"Thirdly, That there may have been divers Species of things wholly destroyed and annihilated, and divers others changed and varied, for since we find that there are some kinds of Animals and Vegetables peculiar to certain places, and not to be found elsewhere; if such a place have been swallowed up, 'tis not improbable that those Animal Beings may have been destroyed with them; and this may be true both of aerial and aquatick Animals:..."

- Robert Hooke, Discourse on Earthquakes, 1667