| LIFE AS WE DO NOT KNOW IT The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life Peter D. Ward New York: Viking, 2006 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
|||
| ISBN 0-670-03458-4 | 292p. | HC/BWI | $25.95 | |
| Page 10: | "Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy..." |
| This Schrödinger quote has it backward: When an organism creates more order, it is decreasing its entropy. |
| Page 29: | "Huge regions of the Earth's rocky surface is vaporized..." |
| Number error: S/B "are vaporized". |
| Page 30: | "The sun would appear much dimmer, perhaps a red orb of little heat, for it not only was burning with far less energy than today, but it had to shine through a poisonous, riled atmosphere composed of billowing carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, steam, and methane." |
| I believe this S/B "a poisonous, roiled atmosphere". |
| Page 33: | Deoxyribosenuleicacid, or DNA..." |
| Missing spaces: S/B "Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid". |
| Page 34: | "These two spirals are bound together by a series of projections, like steps on ladder, made up of the distinctive DNA bases..." |
| Missing word: S/B "like steps on a ladder". |
| Page 40: | "It and the rest of its species, for there were more than one of these little urchins, even have a name..." |
| This is grammatically correct, yet it sounds strange in my mind's ear. I want to hear: "for there was more than one". |
| Page 42: | "A tree starts from a seed, grows roots (down) and a trunk (up), and then builds an ever more anastomozing series of branches out of the trunk." |
| This book is not supposed to be for specialists: if used, the word should be defined. Also, based on the definitions I found, it seems to be misused. |
| Page 46: | "According to these studies, there is nothing more 'primitive' still living on Earth than Archaeans. They seem to show more characteristics and genes with the supposed primordial organism (the hypothesized common ancestor of all life) than any other living organism on Earth." |
| Word choice: S/B "seem to share more characteristics and genes with. |
| Page 52: | "Earlier we quoted the statement that the swarms of viruses around and in each cell of life on our planet causes a huge selective pressure on the living cells." |
| Number error: S/B "swarms...cause". (And, to pick another nit, he didn't quote that statement; he quoted a statement to that effect.) |
| Page 56: | "So here we come to the another conclusion of this book (so far): A second domain in Ribosa of life must be identified, if RNA life existed." |
| a) extra word: S/B "another". (And I would delete the redundant "(so far)". b) Word order: S/B "of life in Ribosa". |
| Pages 56-7: | "As we have seen, life on Earth has been very successful in colonizing much of planet's surface, even down a kilometer or two into its crust, as well as far up into the atmosphere." |
| Missing word: S/B "much of the planet's surface". |
| Page 57: | "But even this great range of temperature, pressure, and amount of oxygen, acidity, and other factors influencing life are not as extreme as we find elsewhere in the solar system." |
| Number error: S/B "these great ranges". (And I'd make "amount" plural as well.) |
| Pages 58-9: | "For example, we could break these aliens down into the following categories: DNA with language or syntax change, or proteins with a different assemblage of amino acids; DNA with chirality reversal; life without DNA as its genome (such as RNA life, protein life, or possibly a protein genome life)." |
| This raises a couple of quibbles in my mind. First, would "DNA with language or syntax change" still be DNA? Second, "life without DNA as its genome" seems to include a lot of possibilities beyond those he mentions. In fairness, he does leave these possibilities open by using qualifiers like "For example" and "such as". More important, this is terra incognita,1 and if I had a good option to suggest, I'd probably be standing by for that call from the Nobel Prize Committee. |
| Page 59: | "A small group of outstanding scientists are now seriously thinking about what they call weird life." |
| I can't help but wonder how many of them have read Ray Bradbury's fact article A Serious Search for Weird Worlds (Life, 1960), reprinted in the late Judith Merril's The Year's Best SF: 6th Annual Edition (Simon & Schuster, 1961). |
| Page 63: | "But does that mean that some sort of silica life is impossible?" |
| Here (as in multiple instances on this page), Ward makes the mistake of using "silica" instead of "silicon". Silicon is a chemical element; silica is a compound — and, as Ward points out, a very stable one. Any "rockhound" will tell you the same about this common mineral, better known as quartz. It is difficult indeed to imagine life based on silicon in our type of environment (Bradbury, op. cit.; Lewis, Worlds Without End). But other temperature regimes may not impose those restrictions. |
| Page 68: | "Romesberg is well on his way to producing a DNA molecule that is made up of "unnatural" base pairs that will function in a living organism. This will, by anyone's definition, be an alien." But is life with such a minor change really an alien? |
| Well, you just said, absolutely and unequivocally, that it is. |
| Page 97: | "Somewhere...microscopic bags of protein, their lipid membrane walls separating them from the surrounding heated seawater or pore fluid, interacted with a different group of aliens." |
| Pore fluid? |
| Page 111: | The paragraph headed "The seashore", which ends on page 112 |
| After convincingly knocking down the model for life originating in a warm pond, Ward proposes in this paragraph that a tide pool would offer superior characteristics for the generation of pre-biotic organic chemicals. Then, without any explanation at all, he proceeds to dismiss it. |
| Page 114: | "And we know that the most common extrasolar planets that can be detected are Jupiter life worlds." |
| S/B "Jupiter-like worlds". |
| Page 116: | "Since good glassware assembled by good chemists with good Bunsen burners were in short supply on the early earth..." |
| Number error: S/B "was in short supply". (Also note that the book is not consistent about capitalizing "Earth".) |
| Page 136: | "The fluids coming out of the white chimneys are enriched in methane, hydrogen, and hydrocarbons other than methane and are thus rich sources of energy in form that can be utilized by life." |
| Number error: S/B "in forms". |
| Page 146: | "The discovery of the Alan Hills, Antarctica, meteorite..." |
| Spelling: According to most sources, S/B "Allan Hills". (In the first ten pages of entries from a Google search on "alan hills meteorite", I found only five entries that spell it the way Ward does. A more substantial minority has it as "Allen Hills".) |
| Page 146: | "The whole enormous controversy around whether or not that fateful Martian meteoroid did indeed contain the remains of life may, more than any other factor, has revived the panspermia hypothesis..." |
| Extra word: Delete "may". |
| Page 151: | "...there are a pair of investigators..." |
| Number error: S/B "is". |
| Page 151: | "This view is in no small way abetted by a recent calculation by Melosh and others who think that at the present time at least a half ton of Martian rocks fall into the Earth's atmosphere each year." (emphasis in original) |
| Compare with the paragraph spanning pages 146-7, where Ward reports on a computer model that predicts that in recent times "as many as a dozen fist-size rocks [from Mars] have landed on the earth each million years." |
| Page 153: | "In the case of life on earth, I suggest that ribosans were better travelers..." |
| This shows the inconsistency of capitalizing "Earth" and "Ribosans" — the latter, ironically, a word Ward himself coined. |
| Page 156: | "Mercury is obviously a lot closer to the sun than Earth, and as the sun is eleven times brighter than on Earth." |
| It seems likely that this should be "and as such, the Sun is eleven times brighter than on Earth". (Also note that Ward does not capitalize "Sun".) |
| Page 158: | "Zahnle is a guy with the kind of track record that you bet your money on. The planet named for love may have had plenty of it." |
| Plenty of what? Love? Money? Zsa Zsa Gabor? (Yes, I know that Ward means "plenty of life", but this fanciful extrapolation is a bit much even for me.) |
| Page 159: | "...and great upward flows of molten rock (the so-called convection cells) carry the hard crust on its back, causing continents to drift." |
| Number error: S/B "on their backs". |
| Page 161: | "The real problem is getting life [on Venus] not to live in the clouds but to form in the clouds." |
| Compare with the ideas advanced on pages 112-113. Also, it's arguable that the highlighted portion should read "is not getting life to live in the clouds". (To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, with reference to the meaning as printed: "Hey! You! Don't live in my cloud!") |
| Pages 171-2: | "Two astronomers from the University of Chicago calculated in 1995 that a star going supernova within ten parsecs (thirty light years) of our sun would release fluxes of energetic electromagnetic and charged cosmic radiation sufficient to destroy the earth's ozone layer in three hundred years or less." |
| For this to hold any credence, I'd have to go with the "or less", since a supernova is a relatively short-lived event. |
| Page 175: | "NASA has had huge triumphs in this new century on its Mars missions and knows more than it is telling about the possibility of life on Mars. For NASA, information about life on Mars is the crown jewel of its intelligence, and getting that information is a bit like getting the CIA to admit what it really knew about Saddam Hussein's WMD, even for us insiders. Needless to say, however, there have been breakthroughs. In this chapter we take a long look at the Red Planet, home to so many supposed inimical aliens, some of them imagined by the scientists of prior Mars." |
| Here, I think Ward means "the scientists of prior Mars missions". |
| Page 190: | "The layer would be not be unlike permafrost." |
| Remove the second "be". |
| Page 207: | "As on Mars, an expected by-product of the radiation will be hydrogen peroxide. This can be a source of free oxygen, which can interact with the organic molecule formaldehyde [CH2O] to power organisms by the reaction of formaldehyde and oxygen reacting to form water and carbon dioxide." |
| Wow — compound redundancy! |
| Page 207: | "It is really cold at [Europa's] surface—the temperature there varies between -304°F and -228°F, which is way, way colder than the minimum temperature for earth life (about -20°F)." |
| Not that it disproves Ward's main point, but on page 192 he quotes Buford Price's far more optimistic estimate. |
| Page 209: | "There is some controversy on just how salty it is and what the chemical constituent might be. . . There are three possibilities:" |
| S/B "the chemical constituents", plural. And why only three possibilities? What about potassium or calcium?. |
| Page 211: | "...—if that they are there at all—..." |
| Remove the "that". |
| Page 216: | "We are standing on a large plain, ankle deep in dark, oily muck. Overhead, a huge and ghostly disk, the specter of Saturn, cutting through a dim orange haze, fills a large segment of the sky." |
| A note about sentence flow. The first sentence is fine. But the second! Try this: "Overhead a huge and ghostly disk, the specter of Saturn cutting through dim orange haze, fills the sky." Too many commas, break up the sentence, interrupt the flow, make it choppy, like the way George Bush, the elder, used to talk. (Of course he still talks that way, I'm sure; he just does it away from TV cameras.) |
| Page 223: | "...where the organic molecules used by the formation of earth life are different on Titan, utilizing organic where oxygen atoms are replaced by nitrogen/hydrogen chemical groups." |
| S/B "organic molecules". |
| Page 223: | "No life has obviously been found on Titan. No human-made object has gotten there." |
| Since NASA's Huygens probe landed on Titan on 14 January 2005, this statement is inoperative. |
| Page 226: | "We have seen that the synthesis of RNA and DNA in water is complicated by the tendency for water to deaminate the molecule..." |
| This technical term can trick the eye: It is not "deanimate", meaning to remove life from or, in plain words, to kill. Rather, it means "to remove the amine groups from". Regardless of this distinction, it's still a deadly effect. |
| Page 232: | "Titan and Triton are the potential habitats of the most exotic life in the solar system..." |
| To my knowledge (and the index supports this), Ward has not mentioned Triton before in the book. He barely mentions it here, and does not say that it is a large moon of Neptune, the last body glimpsed by Voyager 2 as it whipped past on its way out of the solar system. |
| Pages 241-2: | "This will be a great problem if we do find life on Mars. If it is identical to earth life, can we say that we did not deposit it there by our successes and failures on that planet?" |
| Almost certainly, based on its geographical distribution. Microbes, assuming the environment supports them, could spread fairly rapidly. Yet I very much doubt we would find them so uniformly spread that we could not pinpoint their origin in one or more spacecraft from Earth. |
| Page 243: | "For years the NASA Planetary Protection Officer has been a great guy named John Rummel, and I admit to being a bit envious of his job. ... Too bad he is an organization of one. Can you imagine how cool the uniforms would be in his Planetary Protection Force?." |
| Actually, I can. They'd be green, of a sturdy fabric, with a stylized representation of the planet of responsibility emblazoned on the left breast. Rank would be indicated by the number of sun-yellow pips on the collar. Dress uniforms would be similar, but of velour, with fancy epaulets and an optional sash. And all the women would look as good as those employed by SHADO — yee-hah! — but they wouldn't have purple hair. |
| Page 243: | "In the case of Stardust, in his wisdom, Rummel and NASA are betting that Wild 2 is sterile..." |
| Remove the highlighted phrase. |
| Pages 244-5: | "Probably of far greater danger...are alien life forms created right on here on Earth specifically to serve as human-killing weapons..." |
| Ward is right about this. But it's also beside the point, in this book. And, remove the first "on". |
| Page 251: | "Thus my sense the that some young graduate student..." |
| Remove "the". |
| Page 255: | "Name of new taxonomic category: Arborea Etymology: From the Latin, for tree" |
| I think the doctor should abide by the conventions of Latin and change the singular form to "Arboreum". Even better might be the variant form "Arboreon" (plural Arboreons). This also sounds better (e.g. "Arboreon Terra, Ward, 2005") and would reduce the chance of erroneous association with Prince Baron of Arborea. |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.