Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique by John Gribbin (PDF)

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The acclaimed author of In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat searches for life on other planetsAre we alone in the universe? Surely amidst the immensity of the cosmos there must be other intelligent life out there. Don’t be so sure, says John Gribbin, one of today’s best popular science writers. In this fascinating and intriguing new book, Gribbin argues that the very existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos is, from an astrophysicist’s point of view, a miracle. So why is there life on Earth and (seemingly) nowhere else? What happened to make this planet special? Taking us back some 600 million years, Gribbin lets you experience the series of unique cosmic events that were responsible for our unique form of life within the Milky Way Galaxy.Written by one of our foremost popular science writers, author of the bestselling In Search of Schrödinger’s CatOffers a bold answer to the eternal question, “”Are we alone in the universe?””Explores how the impact of a “”supercomet”” with Venus 600 million years ago created our moon, and along with it, the perfect conditions for life on EarthFrom one of our most talented science writers, this book is a daring, fascinating exploration into the dawning of the universe, cosmic collisions and their consequences, and the uniqueness of life on Earth.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review * “”This book’s title exaggerates the author’s argument about the rarity of life in the “”universe””: Gribbin (astronomy, Univ. of Sussex, UK; In Search of the Multiverse) claims only that intelligent life in the Milky Way galaxy (not the entire universe) is almost certainly limited to Earth. Since there are billions of galaxies in the visible universe (and possibly an infinite number beyond the reach of our instruments), his carefully limited claim is sensible. He presents a formidable array of evidence from astronomy, astrophysics, geology, and evolutionary biology to support his basic assertion. Gribbin’s definition of intelligent life on Earth includes only Homo sapiens, so he is weighing the likelihood that species on other planets within the local galaxy have intelligence equaling or exceeding that of humans. His case is well presented, but the odds may shift in the next few decades as more data are gathered on the Earthlike planets outside our solar system. VERDICT Gribbin is a veteran author of popular science books; this new volume should be of great interest for all readers curious about the possibility of life beyond our own planet. Strongly recommended.””—Jack W. Weigel, formerly with Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor (Library Journal, November 15, 2011)””The Milky Way contains a few hundred billion stars, but almost certainly contains only one intelligent civilization,”” says astrophysicist and veteran popular science writer Gribbin (The Theory of Everything). In an infinite universe, on the other hand, anything is possible, but we can only explore such questions closer to home. Gribbin makes a thoroughly lucid and convincing case. Recent astronomical observations have shown that exoplanets—worlds orbiting other stars—are more common than we expected, but Earth-like worlds are rare. And even planets in a “”habitable zone”” of both a galaxy and an individual star need water and the right organic compounds to engender and sustain carbon-based life. “”Life got a grip on Earth with almost indecent haste,”” but it took Earth’s metallic core and a near-twin Moon to stabilize Earth’s tilt and steer off dangerous radiation; equally advantageous to Earth, Jupiter’s mass pulls in most of the comets and asteroids that might otherwise smash into us. Gribbin lays out the details one by one, building a concise case that “”[w]e are alone, and we had better get used to the idea.”” (Dec.) (Publishers Weekly, October 24, 2011) From the Inside Flap Are we alone in the universe?For some of us, it is an article of faith; for others, it’s simple arithmetic: with hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, billions of which are circled by planets capable of supporting life, there simply must be intelligent beings elsewhere in the Milky Way. Throw in the countless other galaxies, and it goes almost without saying that the universe abounds with intelligent species capable of building civilizations, right? Not so fast.In Alone in the Universe, acclaimed science writer and astrophysicist John Gribbin builds a convincing case for the uniqueness of intelligent life on Earth. Asserting that a “habitable” planet need not be inhabited by intelligent beings, he cites a wealth of recent scientific findings to suggest that the incredible diversity of life on Earth resulted from a chain of events so unlikely as to be unrepeatable in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way.The most significant of these events was the impact of a Mars-size object with Earth soon after our planet formed. It was this unimaginable impact, Gribbin argues, that changed almost everything about our planet. It gave us a moon, and thus tides; altered the tilt of Earth in its orbit around the sun; and set the scene for continents to drift.A novel feature of Gribbin’s argument is the suggestion that another catastrophic event occurred in our solar system six hundred million years ago. An enormous super-comet collided with Venus, scattering ice balls and dust grains across the inner solar system. A side effect of this activity triggered a freezing of Earth into a “snowball” state. The most profound transformation then occurred among the microscopic, single-celled organisms that had populated Earth virtually unchanged for three billion years. Suddenly, as Earth thawed, complex multicelled organisms appeared, including the first complex sea animals, and life began moving onto land. This sudden profusion of life, known as the Cambrian Explosion, marked the effective beginning of rapid evolution on Earth—but it took a disaster of cosmic proportions to set it off. Had it not happened, Gribbin argues, there would be no intelligent life here. What are the chances that such an improbable chain of events could occur twice in the same galaxy? Zero, says Gribbin.Is there an upside to Alone in the Universe? For one thing, Gribbin says, Earth and human beings are special, after all. We are no longer insignificant specks in the cosmos but the unique products of an extraordinary set of circumstances that have as yet occurred nowhere else in our galaxy, and possibly not in any galaxy. As such, we are the only witnesses with an understanding of the origin and nature of the universe, and our home is the only “intelligent” planet. Gribbin ends his discourse with an impassioned plea for action against climate change and to restore the ailing ecological systems of a planet like no other. From the Back Cover The acclaimed author of In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat examines the miracle of life on EarthAre there other planets in the galaxy that can sustain life? Almost certainly so. Are any of them likely to be populated by intelligent beings? According to John Gribbin, one of today’s most popular science writers, definitely not. In this fascinating and intriguing new book, Gribbin argues that the very existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos is, from an astrophysicist’s point of view, almost a miracle. So why is there intelligent life on Earth and (seemingly) nowhere else? What happened to make this planet special? Taking us back billions of years to a time before Earth even existed, Gribbin lets you experience the series of extraordinary cosmic events that were responsible for our unique form of life within the Milky Way galaxy.Critical acclaim for John Gribbin”The master of popular science.”—The Sunday Times (London)”Gribbin explains things very well indeed, and there’s not an equation in sight.”—David Goodstein, The New York Times Book Review, on Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science”Gribbin takes us through the basics [of chaos theory] with his customary talent for accessibility and clarity. [His] arguments are driven not by impersonal equations but by a sense of wonder at the presence in the universe and in nature of simple, self-organizing harmonies underpinning all structures, whether they are stars or flowers.”—The Sunday Times (London) on Deep Simplicity”Gribbin breathes life into the core ideas of complexity science, and argues convincingly that the basic laws, even in biology, will ultimately turn out to be simple.”—Nature magazine on Deep Simplicity”In the true quantum realm, Gribbin remains the premier expositor of its latest developments.”—Booklist on Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality About the Author JOHN GRIBBIN is one of today’s greatest writers of popular science and the author of bestselling books including In Search of the Multiverse (Wiley), In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, and Science: A History. He trained as an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and is now Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I first learned about this book in a Wall Street Journal review that was positive. The review was accurate.This is a fascinating scientific study and argument for why we are alone in the universe. As the author mentions in the last sentences of the book: “The reasons why we are here form a chain so improbable that the chance of any other technological civilization existing in the Milky Way Galaxy at the present time is vanishingly small. We are alone, and we better get used to the idea.” As he goes through the improbable events that I’ll summarize below, I kept coming back to the analogy of a lottery – but not winning the lottery once but many times in a row. The chances of this happening are so improbable as to be impossible. It gave me the impression that a miracle occured to result in life on earth…The author starts with the galaxy and universe initially and why our area of the universe is unique versus others and continues on to life on earth over the 5 billion+ years of its existence. Here’s a summary of the improbable events.1. There are very few places in the Milky Way Galaxy where life could exist. Most areas of the Galaxy have very intense radiation, gases and stars too close and colliding with each other.2. Then there is the size of the star. A star that is too large destroys planets and doesn’t last long enough for life to exist. A star that is too small doesn’t enable enough heat and light for life to exist. The sun is just the right size. (And, forget about the multi-star solar systems dreamed up in Hollywood.)3. Then there is the solar system. Having Venus, and Jupiter where they are results in cover for the Earth. Instead of hitting the Earth, many asteroids and comets hit Jupiter (pulled by its gravity) as happened in the 1990s.4. Then there is the moon. There are no planets that have a moon revolving around it that has the comparable size in comparison to the earth. And, in fact, the moon resulted from a collision with the earth more than 600 million years ago that caused life to start on Earth.5. Then there is the Earth itself. We have a large magnetic force around our planet that keeps radiation to a minimum. The Earth travels around the sun 365 days for a year which is enabling to life. The tectonic plates help for carbon dioxide and oxygen to form and enable life.6. Then there are the events that happened on the earth over 600 million years that enabled life to develop and intelligent life to develop including the magnetic poles, the tectonic plates, the collisions with meteors (to cause the dinosaurs to disappear because if they hadn’t, we wouldn’t have appeared), the rise and fall of Ice Ages.7. Finally, there is the fragility of intelligent life, which almost disappeared from Earth thousands of years ago, due to volcanic eruptions (e.g. Yellowstone) and/or meteor hits (e.g. larger than the Siberia one of the early 20th century) and the population of possible intelligent life initiators was down to a handful. And, then the fact the dinosaurs and other previous life resulted in fossel fuels that helped our civilization develop. Finally, the possibility of another similar event in the near future destroying our civilization.And there is the “Fermi Paradox”, introduced early in the book, and continued to be used later, which essentially states that if there are other intelligent societies out there, why aren’t they here? For example, the Milky Way Galaxy started 10 billion years ago. As mentioned in the book, using spacecraft that travel .2% the speed of light, which we could do today using Jupiter and the Sun to help propel it, and Von Neumann computers (or robots) that reproduce themselves, that we could also use today, if we didn’t want to use humans because of the length of time to travel in space, it would take an intelligent society 10 million years to visit the possible earth like planets in the Galaxy. So, why haven’t they done it (as Fermi a leading physicist asked)?As I read the book, it became more and more apparent to me that for this to happen again in the Milky Way Galaxy and even the universe is so improbable as to be impossible. So, in spite of the all the movies out there that fantasize about other life in the Galaxy by Steven Spielberg and others (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar and other Hollywood productions that take advantage of this false premise), and probably make it hard for some of us to believe these results, we need to recognize that WE are the only intelligent society in the Galaxy and possibly the universe and handle that accordingly.For anyone who is interested in the truth about our Galaxy, the Universe and life, this is an excellent book.

⭐The guy who wrote this was brilliant, it will mean the end of UFO nonsense

⭐A fascinating and disturbing bookAlone in the Universe by John Gribbin is the most interesting and disturbing science book written in 2011. I have read it three times and may read it three times more to absorb it all. Basically, Gribbin says that there are no other intelligent beings anywhere in the universe. We are unique. He explains this in detail.In the first place, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Galaxy. There are billions of galaxies in the universe. Most stars have planets whirling around them. From these numbers, and the fact that we are here, one would assume that there would be several, or at least one other planet that has intelligent life on it. Not so, explains Gribbin.Only a tiny fraction of the stars in our universe are capable of having planets on which intelligent life could live. The temperature has to be between 0 and 89 degrees at all times. There has to be lots of liquid water. Then there has to be a nearby moon like ours which causes tides and keeps the planet steady as our moon does. Without our moon we could not exist. But our moon was created in a unique way by another planet the size of Mars crashing into the earth, melting it, and creating the moon from the debris of the crash.There has been life on the earth for at least 4 billion of our 4.5 billion years. There is probably life on billions of other planets in similar orbit around suitable stars. Life seems to have been easy to create from the chemicals available in space. But the type of life that we had was tiny creatures in the ocean. Life on land has been comparatively recent – a few hundred million years.Dinosaurs were an important feature of life on land until they were all wiped out by an asteroid 65 million years ago – an extinction that permitted mammals to thrive and ultimately to take over the earth. But how likely is it that mammals on other planets could evolve into intelligent beings that could communicate with others and think about the universe as we do?Almost impossible, says Gribbin. The chimpanzees that we evolved from lived in the trees in Africa. What made them come down and walk around, speaking to each other, writing things down and developing the high intelligence that we have today? Answer: a series of ice ages that dried up the rain, killed off the trees and forced the chimps to live on land where they could be eaten by lions, tigers and other predators. The chimps used language to hunt, developed fire, bows and arrows, and other sophisticated methods for survival. Human beings are the result.It is highly unlikely that such ice ages could have occurred on any other planet at just the right time to convert monkeys into men. So from all the improbabilities of the stars, planets, moons, and ice ages, we come down to the conclusion: we are alone. Eventually we will be wiped out by one of a dozen things:An asteroid will hit the earth, wiping us out. The moon will get too far away (it is drifting away now) to protect the earth from rolling over. The earth’s magnetism will shift (as it has done before) removing its protection from the sun’s rays, or, finally, the sun will use up its hydrogen fuel and expand, burning us up. When this happens, all mankind will end, and no one will know that we were here. There are no beings out there who will be aware that wonderful things happened on the earth.

⭐Started out making its case pretty well, reducing the likelihood of other life (meaning here intelligent life, not just life) by the multiplicative effect of reducing the probability by each improbable coincidence that occurred in, on and around the Earth that made us uniquely viable to exist. Things like double stars, tectonics of thin crusts, our oversized moon, our position in the galaxy, goldilocks, iron core magnetic field protection from radiation, ….But it went off topic in my opinion to events that occurred here, true enough to limit our chances, but that could happen anywhere in the universe, such as meteor wipeouts, rotation wobble, volcanoes, CO2 buildup, …. so contribute little to the ultimate case of our unique aloneness.So I think the case could have been made convincingly in 50 pages, instead of 200 pages of some wanderings, of us being the only INTELLIGENT creatures our there – not that life of any kind could not exist.

⭐After a life-time of amateur interest in our universe and our place within it, I feel that I have wide, but cetainly shallow, knowledge of the subject. This book is very readable, though pauses for reflection and mental recovery are recommended. It gives much detail of present theories and evidence for the universe and ourselves being as we are at this stage of our (joint) evolution, and is well worth reading. Its case that we intelligent beings are alone in the vastness is pretty convincing but “Drake” has a good reputation, has he not ? Gribbins makes a good show of having many of the answers but it would be very deflating to further enquiry were there not some scope left for uncertainties. Recommended as an interesting and cogent viewpoint over areas of physics, etc, not covered commonly outside academe, it is thought.

⭐This is an interesting explanation of Fermi Paradox versus Drake Equation. However I feel the arguments could do with fleshing out and perhaps some numerical values attached to parameters in Drake Equation. Not good value at original price and where is paperback promised in April. The triggering of snowball earth and hence Cambrian Explosion by a giant comet colliding with Venus I have never seen before and I subscribe to Science and Scientific American. It smacks of Worlds in collision.

⭐Excellent. well-rounded, comprehensive, organised, easy read. See the website reasons.org for more information on the fine tuning of our planet.

⭐Very Thought provoking.

⭐Has opened my mind to how unique we are and how lucky I’m able to know! I learnt so much & it’s inspired me to learn more..

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