| CAPTURED BY ALIENS The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe Joel Achenbach New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-684-84856-3 | ||||
| ISBN 0-684-84856-2 | 415p. | HC/BWI | $25.00 | |
| Page 154: | "The closest thing anyone had come to making fusion energy work was annihilating the Bikini Atoll." |
| Extra word: S/B "closest anyone had come". |
| Page 156: | "Isn't it far more likely that we will run into the same unavoidable problems of energetic and political will that other (hypothetical) civilizations have face?" |
| S/B "energetics and political will". |
| Page 168: | "(Though I must quickly admit that this is one of those classic Internet factoids that emerge from the digital universe unsourced, their origin a mystery.)" |
| Error of number: S/B "its origin". |
| Page 250: | "If it has no inertia, it can be the size of an aircraft carrier or the size of a VW Beetle. It just goes. Violà! We've crossed the galaxy." |
| Spelling: S/B "Voilà!" |
| Page 256: | "Zubrin said this process is not that difficult; you can make propellant with Martian dirt." |
| I think Achenbach misunderstood what Zubrin said. Zubrin has plans for Martian dirt; but those plans don't include making propellant from it. |
| Page 294: | "Do the aliens reproduce sexually? Are they predominantly asexual, like the inhabitants of the planet Winter in Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness?" |
| Achenbach misremembers. The inhabitants of Gethen (aka Winter) were most emphatically not asexual. Indeed, their sex drives more closely resembled traditional estrus than ours do. They were serially bisexual, changing (IIRC) back and forth at intervals during their lives. |
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