Venus Interruptus
Modern planetary exploration rudely interrupted our age-old dreams of an Earth-like Venus. The high surface temperature on Venus was the first significant discovery ever made at another planet with a visiting spacecraft. Venus, a metal-melting furnace with a corrosive atmosphere and clouds so acidic they could etch glass, was declared off-limits to life. The romance was over. But planets seem to be like this every time we take a closer look, we see new sides to the place. Our understanding of...
The Missing Link Rna World
What was the evolutionary step, or series of steps, between simple self-replicating molecules and the elaborate reproductive machinery common to all living cells on Earth How did organics beget organisms This, not some shadowy ape-man, is the real missing link in evolution. The link may have been found in the form of remarkable chemicals called ribozymes, the discovery of which bagged a Nobel Prize for chemists Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman in 1989. Ribozymes are molecules of RNA that, in...
Index
382,386,421 Abelson, Philip, 229 accidental contamination, 258 accretion, energy of, 157 Ackerman, Diane, 408 Aczel, Amir, 143, 147-148 adolescent optimism, 305 Africa, origin of life in, 126-127 Agassiz, Louis, 19 Age of Reason, 30, 33 Albee, Edward, 97 Aldrin, Buzz, 52 alien life belief in, 6 communicating with, 406-407 as a cultural phenomenon, xvii, 5 current knowledge about, xiii-xiv debunking, 351-352, 354 on Earth, 130 groups of believers in, 11 renewed hopes for finding, xiii, 64...
Preface
Here's how this book is supposed to start My fellow humans, we stand here today at the edge of a new age of cosmic discovery that will transform all of our lives. Recent breakthroughs have sparked a scientific revolution in the search for life in outer space. Any day now, we may meet with success and find proof that we are not alone in the universe. And, indeed, it's true. Numerous recent findings have helped to ignite a resurgence in scientific interest in the study of extraterrestrial life....
Cosmism
I've been describing all this from an American perspective, but on the other side of the Iron Curtain, plans were also being drawn for robotic visits to the planets. In fact, the Soviet scientific establishment was more open than American scientists to the study of extraterrestrial life. The ground was prepared by the philosophical tradition of Russian Cosmism. Cosmism, or cosmic philosophy, was a space-related philosophy that thrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It...
Spirits from the Vasty Deep
We have all felt this impulse in our childhood as our ancestors did before us, when they conjured goblins and spirits from the vasty void, and if our energy continue we never cease to feel its force through life. We but exchange, as our years increase, the romance of fiction for the more thrilling romance of fact. Image unavailable for electronic edition Image unavailable for electronic edition I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Why, so can i, or so can any man, but will they come
Same As The Old Mars
There is a cyclical quality to our ideas about Mars. Like pilgrims seeking tears on a stone Virgin, we are ready to announce, at the least provocation, that we see water running there still. For over a hundred years now, the watery channels of Mars have reappeared in different forms. So, when MGS scientist Ken Edgett excitedly exclaimed at the press conference, This is not your mother's Mars I thought, No, but it might be my grandmother's. I am not convinced that the gullies are evidence for...