Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis Of) Alien Life

by Peter D. Ward

Book Overview

A revealing exploration of the latest NASA research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life also poses a hypothesis about the origins of life on Earth, examining the controversial idea of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670034584
• ISBN13: 9780670034581
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Is there anybody out there?

To understand just how rare life is we need first to understand how rare matter is. If the sun were shrunk to the size of an orange, the Earth would be represented by an object less than the size of a grain of sand and even that grain of sand would be some 20 kilometers from the orange. This mental exercise shows dramatically that empty space is overwhelmingly comprised of, well, empty space. (Actual the space isn't technically completely empty but the model still gives some idea of the relative sizes and distances we're talking about here.) Now life, among all those oranges and grains of sand is even rarer. According to Ward prudent speculation would have it that perhaps it may only have existed on Mars (and even at that over three billion years ago) and may only currently exist on Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons. In laying out his case, Ward says some interesting and important things about the nature of life. First he asks a question unhelpfully asked by philosophers but more recently and much more meaningfully asked by the likes of Erwin Shroedinger (in his 1944 masterwork What is Life?) and by University of Adelaide's Paul Davies (in his msterwork, The Fifth Miracle): What is life? After noting that its constituent ingredients and tendency to survive and reproduce, Ward notes that life is autonomous. Wisely, he kicks the door open on the idea that life as we do not know it may have different constituent elements on other planets or biospheres (like the moon Titan or perhaps even a comet). It may be silicon based. It may live off amonia. It may even not use a DNA like coding system. For one used the traditional optimism of popular science books vis a vis the possibility ubiquity of life (Carl Sagan even demanded that Viking have nightlights so as not to miss out on nocturnal Martian life), Ward's commonsense approach to the issues he deals with is refreshing. Let's take the Earth as a for instance. Until 600 million years ago, one would be hard pressed to find life here without a microscope (though admittedly the oxygen content of the atmosphere among other phenomenon would provide their own clues). And in terms of intelligent life, even clothing only dates back but a million years...less than three tenths of one percent of the age of the planet. City-states and animal domestication (e.g. the domestication of dogs) date back about ten to fifteen thousand years. And needless to say, the modern industrial age itself only dates back two hundred years. So even here, on this planet, multicellular life and intelligent life have ranged from rare to exceedingly rare. Being a fair reporter Ward candidly admits that not only may he be wrong in his observations but he would like to be wrong in them as well. But regardless his ultimate suggestions that we explore Mars for its history and Titan for its present are well supported and worthy considering. Whether life is or is not ultimately common we do not now know. But we can b

Are there aliens among us?

Not long ago, Peter Ward, with co-author Donald Brownlee, scandalised the SciFi world. In "Rare Earth", they assessed the contingencies that would lead to complex and intelligent life and found all those ET types seriously wanting. Too many binocular, bipedal and articulate organisms for their liking. "Alien" life, however, is very likely to exist in Ward's analysis in this successor volume. Indeed, he stresses, it may be very close. Alien life using survival methods we have little or no knowledge of, may have emerged in parallel with ours. We need to accept that possibility and learn to search for and identify it. Viruses, of course, are the prime candidates. Many biologists, however, reject the virus as part of life - they cannot reproduce without a host, and their genetic information is limited, usually to RNA instead of the DNA underlying the life we understand. Another "alien" life form - many of them, actually - have been found surrounding the "black smokers" at the bottom of the seas. Living entirely without sunlight, at temperatures that would annihilate surface life, they metabolise sulphur instead of oxygen, they violate every standard definition of life. Or did until they were discovered. Today, they are leading candidates to represent how life originated on this planet. For Ward, more than just their novelty, the organisms around the black smokers demonstrate how life can exist in extreme environments. "What does chemistry permit?" he asks, and spends the remainder of the book providing answers to that query. He reminds us that life on our planet has had nearly four billion years to experiment with conceiving life forms. How many attempts of various types have started? How many of succeeded? Charles Darwin, Ward says, laid down "an iron-clad doctrine that all life on Earth comes from a single ancestor". Yet Darwin knew nothing of genetics, black smokers or "extremophile" life. Ward, in keeping with taxonomic rules, wants to establish a new division of classification: Terroan life. He rests this proposal on three aspects of life: the time it has had to develop new forms, the wide variety of those forms and the almost astounding number being newly discovered. All of which leaves aside the numbers to emerge - even those made by us. Ward's chapter on "The Artificial Synthesis of Life" is certain to chain any reader's attention. Strides made in this field are, to put it mildly, compelling. Genetics researcher Jack Szostak, who figures large in this chapter, has estimated that a DNA-based life form could be achieved for about US$20 million - a paltry sum. Using the famous Urey-Miller experiment in the 1950s that produced amino acids, Ward moves on to note how important a membrane is to allow organisation and complexity to fulfill what the Urey-Miller experiment started. Ward argues that the "bottom-up" method, starting with basics is preferable to trying to create a new DNA-based organism. "Self-assembly" of th

A thorough study of the issue

"Life as We Do Not Know It" is a truly entertaining book, and it's definitely thorough in it's perspective and presentation. I really enjoyed Ward and Brownlee's book "Rare Earth," published in 2003. I felt it brought a little sober balance into the whole search for extraterrestrial life thing. So often with a truly enchanting perspective, like that of the SETI people, everyone gets so charmed by the popular concept that few are willing to raise a dissenting voice even if it is realistic. After all, who wouldn't like to find ET out there? And with as disarming a spokesperson as the late Carl Sagan to push for it, who would be so bold as to point out difficulties. If Ward's description in his more recent book, "Life as We Do Not Know It" of his cool if not down right rude reception by a SETI administrator at a dinner party cum science meeting is true, one can certainly see why those with a nay-say keep a low profile. That's too bad, too, because far more can be achieved with a more modest means by facing reality than by grand illusions. Admittedly the public's--or their political representatives'--unwillingness to part with funds for scientific projects unless they generate popular enthusiasm is much to blame for this single sided point of view. Suddenly science, especially space science, ends up a sort of traveling road show, with NASA in competition with other purveyors of big budget science for funds. I can't decide if Ward has joined "The Dark Side" with his new book or is genuinely this enthusiastic about discovering life on other planets. Certainly his presently taking part in NASA's study of life on planet earth and of the implications for its occurrence elsewhere might tend to bias his point of view a little. This noted, however, Ward's new work certainly gives a thorough discussion of what we know of the origins of life on our own planet, particularly that of our extremeophiles. He discusses the many possibilities with respect to how life arose, when it did, and under what types of conditions it survived and thrived. More recent studies of deep earth organisms and of thermophiles living around the mid-ocean ridges that circumscribe the globe like big zippers, has lead to a more optimistic view of the toughness of life. Those first little critters who set our bio-world going were tenacious if nothing else. From these "ancestors" of earth life as we know it today, the author projects the likelihood that similar--or very alien--life might have arisen in the past on other planets given similar conditions. He uses the planets Mars and Venus and the moons Europa, Titan and Triton as his most likely venues for past life, and gives odds on whether life might exist still on Europa or Titan. He also presents the possibility of life on Venus--much as Sagan did for Jupitor and Saturn in his book Cosmos in the 1970s--floating in the gaseous clouds. He also discusses the long discredited notion of Panspermia, now once again

Well researched & written, but has its shortcomings

This book offers a detailed look at the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System. Ward starts off examining how life got started on Earth, in order to understand how it could get started elsewhere. He comes across as very knowledgable on the subject and gives a very interesting survey of the various theories and their problems. His discussion of how life can hitchhike on meteors is very convincing, as he demolishes the objections one by one. He discusses all the possible types of 'alien life', including some I had never encountered before. He then looks at Mars, Europa, Titan and the upper atmosphere of Venus as the most likely abodes of life. Overall, this is a very good book. Peter Ward packs a lot of information into a moderately sized book and does so in a very readable fashion. I found this book hard to put down. He also scores some definite hits: his speculation that viruses not only qualify as life (a somewhat controversial point) but also are representatives of the earliest type of life, with cellular life coming later, (a very controversial point) has been bolstered by recent research, including the discovery of a super virus with more genes than the simplest bacteria. His suggestion that the Moon is a source of pristine fossiles from early Earth, Mars and Venus via meteor transfer (an incredible 2% of the rocks on the Moon are believed to have originated elsewhere) provides a real justification for returning there. On the other hand, Ward has a tendency to make claims he can't, or doesn't, prove. His off-hand claim to have solved the cause of the Permian/Triassic extinction (by far the worst on record) would be disputed by most scientists in the field, who consider the question still open. His dismissal of the possibility of life in the atmosphere of Jovian planets would be more convincing if he explained why the lack of iron was a show-stopper. He also claims that ammonia has been found in the Martian atmosphere, something categorically denied by the ESA; a demonstration of why you don't treat unsubstantiated rumor as fact. Perhaps the most annoying part to me is the bibliography. Ward does not footnote every assertion, not unreasonable in a popular book, but for many of the more interesting or controversial points, there is no reference in the bibliography. This leaves the reader stuck with either accepting Ward's statements as gospel or having to do a lot of research to doublecheck them. So, not a perfect book, but still a very strong one. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.

Crackpot or Jackpot?!?!

I am a big fan of GWCW [Geologists Who Can Write] and Peter Ward is at the top of that list. Most of Ward's books deal with paleontology, Earth history, evolution, and extinction, but many readers know him mainly from his [in]famous [and often misunderstood] book Rare Earth coauthored with Don Brownlee. Life As We Do Not Know It brings us up to date on the search for [and synthesis of] alien life. In several places in the book, Ward goes way out on a limb [of the Tree of Life] and proposes several new levels in the taxonomy of life. We also get a tour of what we might find on other planetary bodies in our solar system. Life As We Do Not Know It is not as well written as Ward's other books [such as On Methuselah's Trail, Rare Earth, or Future Evolution] and therefore I must rank it 4 stars, but still recommend it highly to anyone interested in astrobiology and the study of life in general.