Customer Reviews

Looking for Life, Searching the Solar System

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Paul Clancy, Andre Brack and Greda Horneck have written a good book on Looking for Life Searching the Solar System.

The readers are shown past explorers, Captain Cook, Magellan,Amundsen, Shackleton, Charles Darwin and more. We are shown as human beings we have an exploring instinct to investigate what is beyond and if we don't we might stagnate as a race and deteriorate. This was interesting but not why I bought the book.

As a life member of the Mars Society I really appreciated mention of our president Robert Zubrin and his Mars direct approach of living off Mars land and using the Mars CO2 atmosphere to make rocket fuel and O2 rather than having to transport all to Mars. Excellent
5 star presentation on this subject.

Also possible future living on the Moon and harvesting 3He for future Fusion reactors. Also interesting is the Fission/Electric/Ion propulsion to the outer planets and visiting Titan, Saturn's giant moon that has lots of hydrocarbons but too cold for life.
Lots more especially about possible finding microscopic life underground on Mars and under the surface/ in a possible under water ocean on Europa. Lots more

Plus the chemistry needed for life is shown and why water is so important. Also the difficulties in Robot vs Human exploration of the planets. What each is best at. Plus the dangers and risks humans will face in manned planet exploration. The reader is gently shown why we must have manned exploration. It is our duty to future civilization to expand and explore. Do we have the right to terraform Mars and possibly other planets? Also the need to protect pristine planets and prevent contamination of the planets from bacteria/germs from Earth and contamination of the Earth from possible lethal bacteria/germs from other worlds. Lots more.

Lots of past spacecraft and missions to the planets and future planned missions. Parts of the future presentation of near term projections of space exploration INMO were much too optimistic due to world wide financial difficulties. Maybe longer term we will see some of the great future space accomplishments.

The book has some nice color pictures and reads well. No boring parts. Just wish more was spent on what actually has to be done to find life rather than the physiological mumbo jumbo parts and comparing the past different explorers. Interesting but for me the actual nuts and bolts of what to do to find life on other planets was more important. A good book recommended 4 stars.

This seems to have been a growth field recently with lots of new books offering varying levels of technical vs. popular coverage of the field of astrobiology. This book takes a straightforward approach in keeping with its title and focuses on life in the solar system and prospectives for hunting it.