Planetary Dreams

The Quest To Discover Life Beyond Earth. "The 'dreams' that I write of are not the usual ones, the images that come up in our minds involuntarily during certain stages of sleep, but rather the hopes and expectations that we have lavished upon other worlds around us."-from the Preface. The surprisingly long history of debate over extraterrestrial life is full of marvelous visions of what life "out there" might be like, as well as remarkable stories of alleged sightings and heated disputes about the probability that life might actually have arisen more than once. In Planetary Dreams, acclaimed author Robert Shapiro explores this rich history of dreams and debates in search of the best current answers to the most elusive and compelling of all questions: Are we alone? In his pursuit, he presents three contrasting views regarding how life might have started: through Divine Creation, by a highly unlikely stroke of luck, or by the inevitable process of a natural law that he terms the Life Principle. We are treated to a lively fictional dinner debate among the leading proponents of these schools of thought-with the last named group arguing that life has almost surely formed in many places throughout the universe, and the others that life may well be entirely unique to our own blue planet. To set the stage for a deep exploration of the question, the author then leads us on a fantastic journey through the museum of the cosmos, an imagined building that holds models of the universe at different degrees of magnification. We then journey deep into inner space to view the astonishingly intricate life of a single cell, and learn why the origin of such a complex object from simple chemical mixtures poses one of the most profound enigmas known to science.