Alien Earths

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For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we're alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life?

As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a uniquely specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In Alien Earths, she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth's history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview - planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and others with more than one sun in their sky! And the best contenders for Alien Earths. We also see the imagined worlds of science fiction and how close they come to reality.

We live in an incredible new epoch of exploration. As our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, Professor Kaltenegger shows how we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars and how we could spot life there. Worlds from where aliens may even be gazing back at us. What if we're not alone?

©2024 Lisa Kaltenegger (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

Lisa Kaltenegger is an enthusiastic guide to the search for life beyond our planet u2014 and the new technologies that could help it succeed ... [the] director of Cornellu2019s Carl Sagan Institute, stands out from the crowd of authors as one of the worldu2019s leading practitioners of astrobiology, with extensive personal involvement in the field. She writes with exemplary clarity about the remarkable diversity of the thousands of planets already identified beyond our solar system u2014 and explains how we could detect clear signs of biology in outer space from the vast influx of data provided by a new generation of ultra-powerful telescopes over the next few years ... the tone of Alien Earths is overwhelmingly positive, as Kaltenegger rejoices in her u201cadventure to find life in the cosmosu201d and invites readers to share her excitement for the search, without getting carried away by u201cwild claimsu201d with insufficient evidence ... she writes.u201cThe most exciting phase is about to begin.u201d
Financial Times

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