Book Review: “Imagined Life” by James Trefil and Michael Summers

Imagined Life by James Trefil and Michael Summers

Every science fiction fan (which would definitely be me) is fascinate by the question “Where is Everybody?”  Is there life beyond the Earth, and if so, what is it like?

The odds seem to say that life should be out there, in fact, should be everywhere.  But if so, we have yet to find evidence.  There are many possible reasons for the absence of evidence.  Webb gives 75 possible explanations  [2], and there are more possibilities than that.

Trefil and Summers are veteran exoplaneteers, deeply involved in the highly successful search for planets outside our solar system.  (Do we need an “Exoplanetary Society” to augment the “Interplanetary Society”?)

Their new book is a popular survey of what life might look like on these exoplanets [1].  (Not a single footnote!)  So, from what we know about the development of life on Earth, and the characteristics of exoplanets, what can we say about the possibility of life, and what form life might take.  Speculation, sure, but highly informed and disciplined speculation.

Spoiler alert:  there are a lot of exoplanets out there, and they are crazy weird by Earth standards.  Even conditions that occur only rarely are likely to exist somewhere.

Another Spoiler:  there are a lot of conditions in which life in one form or another could well emerge. A lot of different and unearthyly conditions.

So, yeah, there could be life everywhere.  But it could be very different from what we know on Earth.  Trefil and Summers go into considerable details about what might be expected and why.

(Caveat:  the definition of “life” is not necessarily clear and obvious.  T&S explain the basic definitional problems.)

They go a step further, and speculate on what “intelligence” and “technological civilization” might look like.  These concepts are even less clear than “life”, not to mention highly anthropocentric.  (I mean, people are still scratching their heads over the “surprising” intelligence of animals, insects, and maybe plants here on Earth.)

However, the speculations on technology are reasonably interesting because they bring to light just how different living conditions are on these hypothesized worlds.  The text is a bit cartoonish in places, but they convey some interesting points.

Much of this material was familiar to me through years of popular science fandom, not to mention blogging about ice worlds.  (Ice worlds, Ho!)

But I learned stuff, and that makes it a good book, no?

The most interesting thing I learned was a new spin on interstellar travel. To date, we have been working on ways to leap the light years between stars.  Even the closest is so far that it the trip would be a century.  Aside from human lifetimes, we can’t build starships that last that long.

T&S point out a really interesting alternative, in the form of “rogue planets”.  These objects are planets ejected from solar systems, wandering between stars.  They are really, really hard to detect because they are relatively tiny and have to star light them up.  But there should be zillions of them, all over the place.

This means that there probably are quite a few between any two stars.  T&S point out that it would be a lot easier to hop to a nearby “rogue planet”, and then to another, and so on, rather than trying to go from star to star.  If these bodies can be set up to be space “coaling stations”, for resupply and repair ([1], p. 137).

Cool!

So now we know a really good reason to put together a “rogue planet” survey, likely out at the leading Sun-Earth Lagrange point.

---

1. James Trefil and Michael Summers, Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey Among the Exoplanets in Search of Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity Animals, Washington, DC, Smithsonian Books.
2. Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life, New York, Springer, 2015.

 

Sunday Book Reviews