Books by James Trefil
“It’s speculating about alternative biologies. The problem is that we have just one example of biology, the one that happened on Earth. Everything on Earth—from a fungal spore to a blue whale, to a redwood tree—is the same biological experiment. We don’t know what a different biological experiment would lead to, or what the creatures and life forms that emerge would look like. If you vary from the one example we know, you’re immediately in the realm of pure speculation. It’s a tricky business because we simply don’t know. I enjoyed the book. I did have a little asterisk in my head as I read it saying, ‘Wait a minute! We don’t know that that could happen or that it would be like that!’” Read more...
Chris Impey, Scientist
Interviews where books by James Trefil were recommended
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1
The Little Book of Exoplanets
by Joshua Winn -
2
Envisioning Exoplanets: Searching for Life in the Galaxy
by Michael Carroll -
3
Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey among the Exoplanets in Search of Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity Animals
by James Trefil & Michael Summers -
4
The Planet Factory
by Elizabeth Tasker -
5
Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth
by Andrew H Knoll
The best books on Exoplanets, recommended by Chris Impey
The best books on Exoplanets, recommended by Chris Impey
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.
