| RARE EARTH Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe Peter D. Ward Donald Brownlee New York: Copernicus, 2000 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-387-98701-0 | 333p. | HC/GSI | $27.50 | |
| Page xxi: | "To test the Rare Earth hypothesis—the paradox that life may be nearly everywhere but complex life almost nowhere—may ultimately require travel to the distant stars." |
| Sentence construction. |
| Page 15: | "Empty space, the interiors of stars, frigid gas clouds, the 'surface' of gaseous planets like Jupiter—all must be lifeless. We cannot know for certain what the limits are for life's environments, ..." |
| Is this not self-contradictory? |
| Page 22: | "Yet in spite of its remote location, Europa is widely regarded as one of the more interesting possible environments for life in the solar system, because it probably has a warm, liquid-water ocean beneath the ice. . . . Europa has a significant ocean below a frozen ice crust..." |
| First it's tentative, then it's definite. This kind of waffling occurs throughout the book. |
| Page 28: | "...whereas the outer regions of habitability are dictated by something quite different: not the flux of energy, but the type of matter to found." |
| Missing word: S/B "to be found". |
| Page 38: | "The Big Bang is what nearly all physicists and astronomers believe is the actual origin of universe." |
| Missing word: S/B "of the universe". |
| Pages 44-45: | "This gas played a major role in forming the sun, Jupiter and Saturn. All the other planets, the asteroids, and the comets formed primarily from the solids." |
| I think that "nearly all physicists and astronomers" would be surprised to learn that Uranus and Neptune are primarily solid bodies. |
| Page 49: | "Collision with a body this size, traveling at a speed of well over 10 kilometers per second results in a very energetic impact event." |
| Missing comma: S/B "second, results". |
| Page 61: | "They contain ratios of the light and heavy isotopes of carbon, indicating formation in the presence of life." |
| Extra comma: S/B "carbon indicating". (With the comma, the sentence says that any ratio of carbon isotopes indicates life.) |
| Page 91: | "An internal architecture and salt balance systems far more advanced than those found in prokaryotes that make this larger size possible." |
| Extra word: S/B "prokaryotes make". |
| Page 94: | "But in oxygen-rich environments the iron rusts out the [ferrous] form, which drops out of solution." |
| Correction inadvertently omitted. |
| Page 104: | "The Wray study, itself yielded both minimum and maximum figures for the earliest divergence." |
| Extra comma: S/B "The Wray study itself". |
| Page 104: | "Perhaps on some worlds in the Universe, animals diversify but never attain larger size and greater numbers in some Cambrian Explosion equivalent." |
| Missing comma: S/B "Perhaps, on some worlds in the Universe,". |
| Page 116: | "The oceans would have begun to accumulate with metal ions, mainly iron and manganese." |
| Missing (or extra) word: S/B either "accumulate regions with metal ions" or "accumulate metal ions". |
| Page 117: | "As we saw in Chapter 2, a planet's average temperature is greatly affected by the volumes of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere. Much of this gas enters a planet's atmosphere from actively erupting volcanoes. Although there are abundant volcanic eruptions in the sea as well, most of the carbon dioxide from these events does not make its way into the atmosphere." |
| This directly contradicts the supporting quote from Kirschvink, immediately below it, which says "Escape from this 'icehouse' condition was only accomplished by the buildup of volcanic gases, particularly carbon dioxide, mostly from undersea volcanic activity." (I might also inquire what passively erupting volcanoes are.) |
| Page 128: | The authors tell us that "In 1823, English geologist Adam Sedgewick named one such unit the Cambrian." |
| But they don't tell us why. Sedgewick based his work on fossils found in Wales. Perhaps "Cambria" was the Roman name for Wales? |
| Page 191: | "We begin our celestial survey with Mercury, a cratered world of great heat on the sunlit side and great cold on its dark side of the slowly spinning planet." |
| S/B "and great cold on the dark side". |
| Page 198: | "Because it contains a much higher percentage of silica atoms it is much lower in density than the mantle material." |
| Extra word: S/B "silica". Period. |
| Page 210: | "Although weathered entails the reduction in size of rocks ..." |
| S/B "weathering". |
| Page 225: | Figure 10-1: Numbers for energy ratio, poles:equator. |
| If, for the 0°-obliquity case (poles at 90°), the poles receive none of the solar energy, how can the equator receive 60% of the energy hitting the poles when it is at 90°? |
| Page 250: | "On Earth, in our most economically prosperous times, we cannot even listen [for ETI signals]." |
| Referring to SETI, the authors bemoan former Senator William Proxmire's curtailing of funds for NASA's SETI program. They assume this was the only such activity, and no mention is made of Project Phoenix. Indeed, they seem poorly informed about SETI in general. |
| Page 253: | "The large, cowboy-style brass belt buckles that of them many wore, with the mission logo engraved thereon, are still seen at various meetings of planetary scientists and engineers." |
| Yoda lives! |
| Page 262: | "In deeper water, high concentrations of dissolved CO2 slows or inhibits the chemical reactions that lead to limestone formation." |
| Error of number: S/B "slow or inhibit". |
| Page 263: | "Yet to heat water temperatures sufficiently to serve as a global thermostat a planet may well exceed the critical 40°C mark that is the critical upper temperature limit of animal life. |
| This number is new; previously the authors put the limit at 50°C. (And it's a nit, but the better wording is "to heat water" or "to raise water temperatures".) |
| Page 265: | "Large land areas also reduce CO2 drawdown , because carbonate formation takes place almost exclusively in oceans . . . Without continents there seems a strong likelihood that a planet will become too hot (especially because main-sequence stars such as the sun increase their energy output through time, and planets cannot move away from this increasing heat source). With too much continental area, the opposite is likely to happen, as continental weathering draws down carbon dioxide so much that glaciations ensue." |
| These passages appear contradictory, but I think they are just poorly written. The truth is that both continents and oceans are necessary for CO2 drawdown, since the carbonates form in the sea but they form from minerals weathered off the land. The tricky bit is the right ratio between land and sea areas — a ratio that depends on other factors. |
| Page 268: | "Even though no extra solar planets were found until the 1990s, ..." |
| Missing hyphen changes meaning: S/B "extra-solar planets". |
| Page 270: | "But what if the conclusions suggested by emerging studies—that Earth-like planets are rare, and planets with metal rarer still—are true?" |
| Poor wording: Since Earth-like planets by definition have metals, this is redundant. |
| Page 270: | "Stars much more massive than the sun have stable lifetimes of only a few billion years, ..." |
| Typo: S/B "million". |
| Page 291: | "In Search for Life in the Universe (Goldsmith and Owen), 213" |
| This index entry has the title wrong: S/B "The Search for Life in the Universe". |
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