Andrew H Knoll

With 10 billion potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the universe, the probability there is life beyond Earth is high. We’re also likely to find out more in the next five to seven years, says Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona and author of Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity. Here, he recommends four brilliant books about exoplanets as well as one about life on Earth, our only example of biology to date.

How has the Earth changed over time and what role has fire played in those changes? A leading geologist, Andrew Scott, identifies key stages and books to help understand them

Without them, plants and animals wouldn’t exist and even the Earth’s geology would be different. Paul Falkowski recommends the best books on microbes.

Palaeontologist Richard Fortey says it took tiny organisms two billion years of work to oxygenate the planet sufficiently for our kind of life, including trilobites, dinosaurs and ourselves, to evolve