| LIGHT OF THE STARS Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth Adam Frank New York: W. W. Norton and Company, June 2018 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-393-60901-1 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-393-60901-4 | 262pp. | HC/BWI | $26.95 | |
| Page 31: | "The frontispiece of an early edition shows our solar system nestled snuggly amidst a cosmos dense with other stars and other worlds." |
| Spelling: S/B "snugly". The word "snuggly" exists. But as an adjective synonomous with "cuddly," it doesn't fit here. |
| Page 39: | "Nestled in a remote, verdant valley valued for its radio (and actual) isolation, Green Band was the new home of American radio astronomy." |
| Spelling: S/B "Green Bank". |
| Page 39: | "Luckily, there were at least few sunlike stars within ten light-years." |
| Missing word: S/B "at least a few". |
| Page 45: | "The observatory's staff now included a driver—a West Virginian with the fairly common (for those parts) first name of French, and the improbable surname of Beverage." |
| Spelling: S/B "Beveridge" (at least according to my memory of Frank Drake's bio by Dava Sobel.) |
| Page 48: | "Experiments done by Harold Miller at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s had already provided compelling evidence that abiogenesis might not be difficult to obtain on a habitable-zone planet." |
| Factual error: These experiments were done by Stanley Miller, with assistance from Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago and later at UC San Diego. |
| Page 65: | "More importantly, 600 degrees was far too hot for any form of life to survive." |
| Missing words: S/B "for any form of life we know". |
| Page 67: | "Born sixty-two years earlier to working-class Jewish parents in Brooklyn, Sagan's love affair with science began as a young boy during a trip to the 1939 World's Fair." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Sagan began his love affair with science". |
| Page 101: | "Greenland is a giant ice slab where seven hundred thousand square miles of glacier rise a mile and a half above sea level." |
| Pronouncibility: S/B "a giant slab of ice". (cf. "Why do they want the Duke's son killed?") |
| Page 126: | "But why did oxygen levels rise up to 21 percent, and no higher?" |
| False assumption: The oxygen concentration by volume has varied between 10 and 35 percent over Earth's past 541 million years. See Varying atmospheric oxygen levels shaped Earth's climate over time, Jim Erickson, Michigan News, 12 June 2015 |
| Page 141: | "...in 1975 a workshop was organized at NASA's Ames Research Center in San Jose, at which the general problem of SETI technologies was first laid out." |
| Factual error: The workshop may have been held in San Jose, but Ames Research Center is in Mountain View. It was founded there in 1939 as the second laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which later became NASA. |
| Pages 144-45: | "The Earth's mass is one three-hundredth that of the Sun, a fact that meant even more precision was needed to detect Earth-sized worlds." |
| Factual error: S/B "one three-hundred-thousandth". Solar Mass: "The above mass is about 332,946 times the mass of Earth (ME), or 1,047 times the mass of Jupiter (MJ)." |
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