Book Review - Life on Other Worlds

Life on Other Worlds
- The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate
Steven J. Dick
Cambridge University Press 1998
290 pages, index

A book review by Danny Yee
http://dannyreviews.com/h/Life_Other_Worlds.html

In _Life on Other Worlds_ Steven Dick surveys the history of scientific
debates over -- and searches for -- extraterrestrial life. Some of the
science is covered, but the primary focus is on how it happened and why
it took the form it did, and on its connections with broader cultural
and social currents. It is dry in places, but _Life on Other Worlds_
is a broad-ranging and readable account which should have wide appeal.
An abridgment and updating of Dick's more academic work, _The Biological
Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the
Limits of Science_, this work lacks full references, but it has an
annotated bibliographical essay that will be more useful for most readers.

An opening chapter covers the history of cosmological, philosophical,
and scientific thinking about life on other worlds, from Democritus down
to Lowell. The remaining chapters cover different themes through the
20th century.

Mars has had a central place in the search for life in the solar
system. Lowell's canals, the search for vegetation, and then space
age observations and the Viking experiments have all been the subject
for debates. And more recently there have been claims of fossils in
Martian meteorites and speculation about Europa and Titan.

The search for other solar systems has been linked from the beginning
with theories of solar system origin. In the first half of the century
proponents of uniqueness such as James Jeans dominated, but the fifteen
years around 1950 saw a dramatic swing the other way. Recent technical
advances have seen the discovery of extrasolar planets -- and this is one
area where much has happened since _Life on Other Worlds_ was published.

Other worlds and aliens are standard fare in science fiction -- and
science fiction has inspired science and scientists. In thirty pages
Dick can only touch on a few topics: founding fathers Wells, Verne,
and Lasswitz, the Golden Age treatment of aliens, and the popular films
that have brought aliens into mainstream culture. "By the end of the
century the alien, barely invented 100 years before, had come to assume
a central role in popular culture and scientific imagination."

Dick gives a brief history of the UFO controversy and the rise and fall of
"the extraterrestrial hypothesis". This "brought scientists out of the
closet on a subject they otherwise might never have addressed" and was
"the public's chief exposure to the subject of extraterrestrial life".

The space program has driven research into the origins of life and
raised the possibility of a universal biology. It has also provided a
new perspective on questions of chance and necessity in evolution, with
evolutionary theorists showing "a diversity of opinion as to whether
intelligence existed beyond the Earth, along with virtual unanimity
that if it did, the forces of natural selection would produce [vastly
different] morphologies".

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with
observational efforts. Around 1960, seminal papers, the Green Bank
conference and the Drake equation heralded a theoretical framework for
the search. This has inspired -- or failed to deter -- a broad range
of modern observation programs.

The possibility of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence
has worried some: there have been concerns about the cultural impact,
and the Christian response has seen the development of astrotheology.
Other debates have centered on the anthropic principle, the idea that
the existence of human life implies physical features of the universe.

In summary, the 20th century extraterrestrial life debates have seen the
triumph of cosmic evolution and the widespread acceptance of a biological
universe. For science they have brought new problems of evidence and
inference, a testing of limits, and a protoscience of exobiology.

--

%T Life on Other Worlds
%S The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate
%A Dick, Steven J.
%I Cambridge University Press
%C Cambridge
%D 1998
%O paperback, index
%G ISBN 0-521-79912-0
%P 290pp
%K astronomy, history of science

15 January 2004

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Copyright (c) 2004 Danny Yee http://danny.oz.au/
Danny Yee's Book Reviews http://dannyreviews.com/
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