The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and
the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our
ever-less-habitable planetary home.
Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible
worlds--and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources,
decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile,
human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond
our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds without End is an
expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search
for planets with the potential to host life.
With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of
astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the
vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying
advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond
Earth--and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the
first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in
1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of
Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler
satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology,
chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of
what's behind this accelerating progress, what's next, and what it might
mean for humanity's future.
The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this
search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the
definition of habitability to the changing shape of space
exploration--as it expands beyond the interests of government to the
pursuits of private industry--Worlds without End shows us the science,
on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.
