| PLANETARY DREAMS: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth Robert Shapiro New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-471-17936-8 | ||||
| ISBN 0-471-17936-1 | 306pp. | HC/FCI | $27.95 | |
First there are two passages from a 1686 book by Bernard de Fontenelle that seem to be incorrectly transcribed. They are on pages 61 and 62.
| Page 61: | "In like manner, grant but a Mathematician one little Principle..." |
| "In like manner, grant a Mathematician but one little Principle..." |
| Page 62: | "...I begin to see the earth so fearfully little, that henceforth I shall never be concerned for anything...when anyone approaches me for carelessness, I will answer, 'Ah, did you but know what the fixed stars are!' " |
| The correct word, I am certain, is "reproaches". |
Next is another mis-transcribed quote on page 125, this one from Jacques Monod:
| Page 125: | "In it I see more than anything else a systematic trucking, a willingness to conciliate at any price, to come to any compromise." |
| Here the correct word is "truckling". |
All three of these are probably editor mistakes. But Shapiro is capable of making his own. On page 169 he writes, "I myself read in depth several of his papers that covered areas in which I had some experience. I concluded that the rule that extraordinary conclusions deserve extraordinary evidence had been totally trashed. Information-poor spectra that could be interpreted in a variety of far less controversial ways were cited as 'irrefutable' evidence for their theories." Here he's discussing the theories of Hoyle and Wickramasinge. But the paragraph is confusing because it starts off referring to Hoyle alone, then switches to both without naming them.
On page 179, Shapiro has a little fun with a Stanley Weinbaum story. Set on Venus — the swampy, fecund Venus of old science fiction — it has its hero battle a variety of monsters including "hostile three-eyed, white-claved Venusian natives". What, the natives are white-claved? Oh, thank goodness! For a minute there, I thought you said they had claws! (The phrase quoted is one of Shapiro's, not from the Weinbaum story.)
Page 182 has what appears to be a genuine goof. Referring to David Grinspoon's description of shiny mountains on Venus, Shapiro writes, "That glitter is not due to ice but to some mineral substance, such as pyrite or tellurium." I can believe it's pyrite, a compound of iron and sulfur. But I doubt the presence of any free metallic element under Venus conditions.
An error of number occurs on page 200: "Perhaps our experience with the robot R2D2 in the Star Wars series has trained us to regard such machines as if they were our faithful servant."
Shapiro makes a point of referring to Earth's natural satellite as "the Moon." There's nothing wrong with that; in fact, I applaud it. But on page 212 he writes of two Russian probes sent to examine the Martian moon Phobos: "One of them was lost because of a ground control error, and the other broke off contact when within sight of the Moon." Capitalized, "the Moon" specifies one particular moon: the natural satellite of our own planet.
Two errors occur on page 232.
| Page 232: | "But Gary (as his friends called him) was aware that life had been discovered at deep sea hot vents on the ocean floor on Earth." |
| A hyphen is needed here: "deep-sea hot vents". |
| Page 232: | "Such thoughts have been set aside as a similar and much more accessible target exists in the Ganymede's neighbor, Europa." |
| "The" should be removed. |
On page 240, he writes, "Scientists still debate whether bodies of liquid do exist on the surface of Titan. In the 1980s Carl Sagan, Jonathan Lunine, and others proposed that an ocean may cover much of that world. But if that were the case, then tidal forces would have acted to make Titan's orbit perfectly circular." This contradicts his earlier observation that neighboring satellites will perturb each other's orbits, introducing eccentricity.
Writing of possible alien probes derelict in our solar system, he says on page 255, "If we make the most pessimistic assumptions, then we would be searching for remnants no larger than the Apollo and Pathfinder spacecrafts." Here, I submit, is a failure of Dr. Shapiro's technological imagination, for he apparently rules out microsats. It could also be argued that, in the vastness of the solar system, artifacts larger than the Queen Mary could go undetected.
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