Light of the Stars Read online

  39.William Sheehan, The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996).

  40.Sheehan, Planet Mars.

  41.Rod Pyle, “Alone in the Darkness: Mariner 4 to Mars, 50 Years Later,” California Institute of Technology, July 14, 2015, https://www.caltech.edu/news/alone-darkness-mariner-4-mars-50-years-later-47324.

  42.“The Dead Planet,” New York Times, July 30, 1965.

  43.Ulivi and Harland, Robotic Exploration, 108–12.

  44.Ulivi and Harland, Robotic Exploration, 114–16.

  45.Elizabeth Howell, “Mariner 9: First Spacecraft to Orbit Mars,” Space.com, November 12, 2012, https://www.space.com/18439-mariner-9.html.

  46.“Welcome to the Planets,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory, https://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/choices/mars1.htm.

  47.Davidson, Carl Sagan, 279–80.

  48.David R. Williams, “Viking Mission to Mars,” Goddard Space Flight Center, last modified September 5, 2017, https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/viking.html, and “A Chronology of Mars Exploration,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, last modified April 16, 2015, https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/marschro.htm.

  49.“Overview: The Mars Exploration Program,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, https://mars.nasa.gov/programmissions/overview/.

  50.Robert Haberle, interview with the author, March 20, 2017.

  51.“The History of Mars General Circulation Model,” Mars Climate Modeling Center, https://spacescience.arc.nasa.gov/mars-climate-modeling-group/history.html.

  52.Haberle, interview.

  53.Williams, “Viking Mission to Mars.”

  54.Williams, “Viking Mission to Mars.”

  55.Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2001).

  56.Anders Persson, “Hadley’s Principle: Part 1—A Brainchild with Many Fathers,” Weather 63, no. 11 (November 2008): 335–38.

  57.David R. Williams, “Mars Fact Sheet,” Goddard Space Flight Center, last modified December 23, 2016, https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html.

  58.Haberle, interview.

  59.Rob Gutro, “Polar Vortex Enters Northern U.S.,” Goddard Space Flight Center, 2014, https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/polar-vortex-enters-northern-us/#.WcAeq62UUo-.

  60.Laura Dattaro, “Check the Weather on Mars, Where NASA’s MAVEN Is Headed,” Weather Channel, November 19, 2013, https://weather.com/science/news/check-weather-mars-where-nasas-maven-headed-20131119.

  61.Andrew P. Ingersoll, Planetary Climates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 96–106.

  62.National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Minerals in Mars ‘Berries’ Adds to Water Story,” news release, March 18, 2004, https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/newsroom/pressreleases/20040318a.html.

  63.National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “NASA Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian Surface,” news release, September 27, 2012, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120927.html.

  64.Michael H. Carr and James W. Head III, “Geologic History of Mars,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 294, nos. 3–4 (June 1, 2010): 185–203.

  65.Paul L. Montgomery, “Throngs Fill Manhattan to Protest Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, June 13, 1982.

  66.Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 66, no. 4 (July/August 2010): 77–83.

  67.R. P. Turco et al., “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 222, no. 4630 (December 23, 1983): 1283–92.

  68.Jill Lepore, “The Atomic Origins of Climate Science,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/the-atomic-origins-of-climate-science.

  69.Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Badash, A Nuclear Winter’s Tale,” Metascience 21, no. 3 (November 2012): 727–31.

  CHAPTER 3: THE MASKS OF EARTH

  1.“Earth’s Early Atmosphere,” Astrobiology Magazine, December 2, 2011, http://www.astrobio.net/geology/earths-early-atmosphere/.

  2.John Reed, “Inside the Army’s Secret Cold War Ice Base,” Defense Tech, April 6, 2012, https://www.defensetech.org/2012/04/06/inside-the-armys-secret-cold-war-ice-base/, and Malcolm Mellor, Oversnow Transport (Hanover, NH: U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, 1963), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/404778.pdf.

  3.“Trail Blazed by Renowned Explorer Leads Danish, U.S. Scouts to Arctic Adventure,” Army Research and Development, December 1960, 14.

  4.“The Ice Sheet,” Visit Greenland, http://www.greenland.com/en/about-greenland/nature-climate/the-ice-cap/.

  5.Frank J. Leskovitz, “Camp Century, Greenland: Science Leads the Way,” http://gombessa.tripod.com/scienceleadstheway/id9.html.

  6.Leskovitz, “Camp Century.”

  7.Leskovitz, “Camp Century.”

  8.Leon E. McKinney, “Camp Century Greenland,” West-Point.org, http://www.west-point.org/class/usma1955/D/Hist/Century.htm.

  9.Gordon de Q. Robin, “Profile Data, Greenland Region,” in The Climate Record in Polar Ice Caps, ed. Gordon de Q. Robin (1983; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100–101.

  10.Joseph Gale, Astrobiology of Earth: The Emergence, Evolution, and Future of Life on a Planet in Turmoil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 125–26.

  11.John S. Schlee, “Our Changing Continent,” United States Geological Survey, last modified February 15, 2000, https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/continents/.

  12.Gale, Astrobiology of Earth, 125.

  13.Willi Dansgaard, Frozen Annals: Greenland Ice Cap Research (Copenhagen: Niels Bohr Institute, 2005), 55–56.

  14.Dansgaard, Frozen Annals, 58.

  15.W. Dansgaard et al., “One Thousand Centuries of Climate Record from Camp Century on the Greenland Ice Sheet,” Science 166, no. 3903 (October 17, 1969): 377–80. See also “The Younger Dryas,” NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/The%20Younger%20Dryas.

  16.Manned Spacecraft Center, “Apollo 8 Onboard Voice Transcription, As Recorded on the Spacecraft Onboard Recorder (Data Storage Equipment),” January 1969, 113–14, https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS08_CM.PDF.

  17.Earthrise, Time, http://100photos.time.com/photos/nasa-earthrise-apollo-8.

  18.K. M. Cohen, S. Finney, and P. L. Gibbard, “International Chronostratigraphic Chart,” International Commission on Stratigraphy, January 2013, http://www.stratigraphy.org/icschart/chronostratchart2013-01.pdf.

  19.Ann Zabludoff, “Lecture 13: The Nebular Theory of the Origin of the Solar System,” University of Arizona Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory, http://atropos.as.arizona.edu/aiz/teaching/nats102/mario/solar_system.html.

  20.C. Goldblatt et al., “The Eons of Chaos and Hades,” Solid Earth Discussions 1, no. 1 (2010), 1–3.

  21.Goldblatt et al., “Chaos and Hades.”

  22.Thomas Holtz, “GEOL 102 Historical Geology: The Archean Eon,” University of Maryland Department of Geology, last modified January 18, 2017, https://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/G102/lectures/102archean.html.

  23.Stanly M. Awramik and Kenneth J. McNamara, “The Evolution and Diversification of Life,” in Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology, eds. Woodruff R. Sullivan III and John A Baross (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 313–16.

  24.Awramik and McNamara, “Evolution and Diversification” 313–18.

  25.Z. X. Li et al., “Assembly, Configuration, and Break-up History of Rodinia: A Synthesis,” Precambrian Research, 160 (2008): 179–210.

  26.David Catling and James F. Kasting, “Planetary Atmospheres and Life,” in Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology, eds. Woodruff R. Sullivan III and John A Baross (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99.

  27.Awramik and McNamara, “Evolution and Diversification,” 321.

  28.Donald E. Canfield, Oxygen: A Four Billion
Year History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 145–46.

  29.“PETM: Global Warming, Natural,” Weather Underground, https://www.wunderground.com/climate/PETM.asp?MR=1.

  30.Canfield, Oxygen, 13.

  31.Canfield, Oxygen, 14.

  32.“Opening a Tectonic Zipper,” Seismo Blog (UC Berkeley Seismology Lab), April 5, 2010, http://seismo.berkeley.edu/blog/2010/04/05/opening-a-tectonic-zipper.html.

  33.Canfield, Oxygen, 14.

  34.Canfield, Oxygen, 14.

  35.Canfield, Oxygen, 41.

  36.Canfield, Oxygen, 41.

  37.Gale, Astrobiology of Earth, 110–11.

  38.Canfield, Oxygen, 41–42.

  39.David C. Catling, Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 50–55.

  40.Catling, Astrobiology, 52.

  41.Alexej M. Ghilarov, “Vernadsky’s Biosphere Concept: An Historical Perspective,” Quarterly Review of Biology 70, no. 2 (June 1995): 193–203.

  42.Irina Trubetskova, “Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky and His Revolutionary Theory of the Biosphere and the Noosphere,” University of New Hampshire, http://www-ssg.sr.unh.edu/preceptorial/Summaries_2004/Vernadsky_Pap_ITru.html.

  43.Ghilarov, “Vernadsky’s Biosphere Concept.”

  44.Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, trans. David B. Langmuir (New York: Copernicus, 1998), 44, 56.

  45.Ghilarov, “Vernadsky’s Biosphere Concept.”

  46.James Lovelock, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  47.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 242.

  48.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 243.

  49.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 243.

  50.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 243–44.

  51.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 253.

  52.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 255.

  53.Joel Bartholomew Hagen, Douglas Allchin, and Fred Singer, Doing Biology (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

  54.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 256–57.

  55.Michael Ruse, “Earth’s Holy Fool?,” Aeon, https://aeon.co/essays/gaia-why-some-scientists-think-it-s-a-nonsensical-fantasy.

  56.John Postgate, “Gaia Gets Too Big for Her Boots,” New Scientist, April 7, 1988.

  57.Ruse, “Earth’s Holy Fool?”

  58.Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 265.

  59.Ruse, “Earth’s Holy Fool?”

  CHAPTER 4: WORLDS BEYOND MEASURE

  1.This section on Thomas See is based on information found in Thomas J. Sherrill, “A Career of Controversy: The Anomaly of T.J.J. See,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 30, no. 1 (February 1999): 25–50, and William Sheehan, “The Tragic Case of T.J.J. See,” Mercury 31, no. 6 (November 2002): 34.

  2.Personal correspondence.

  3.Amy Veltman, “Dr. Jill Tarter: Looking to Make ‘Contact,’ ” Space.com, November 12, 1999, https://web.archive.org/web/20081005020231/http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/tarter_profile_991112.html.

  4.“Jill Tarter,” SETI Institute, https://www.seti.org/users/jill-tarter.

  5.Jill Tarter, interview with the author.

  6.John Billingham, “SETI: The NASA Years,” in Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: SETI Past, Present, and Future, ed. H. Paul Shuch (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 70.

  7.Jesse L. Greenstein and David C. Black, “Detection of Other Planetary Systems,” in The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: SETI, eds. Philip Morrison, John Billingham, and John Wolfe (Washington, DC: NASA Scientific and Technical Information Office, 1977).

  8.Greenstein and Black, “Detection.”

  9.Tarter, interview.

  10.David C. Black and William E. Brunk, eds., An Assessment of Ground-Based Techniques for Detecting Other Planetary Systems, Volume 1: An Overview (Moffett Field, CA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1979), 18.

  11.Michael D. Lemonick, Mirror Earth: The Search for Our Planet’s Twin (New York: Walker, 2012), 55.

  12.Lemonick, Mirror Earth.

  13.Lemonick, Mirror Earth, 52–53.

  14.Lemonick, Mirror Earth, 58.

  15.Andrew Lawler, “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search,” Air and Space, May 2003, http://www.airspacemag.com/space/bill-boruckis-planet-search-4545405/?no-ist.

  16.Lawler, “Borucki’s Planet Search.”

  17.Lawler, “Borucki’s Planet Search.”

  18.William J. Borucki et al., “Kepler Planet-Detection Mission: Introduction and First Results,” Science 327, no. 5968 (February 19, 2010): 977–80.

  19.“Liftoff of Kepler: On a Search for Exoplanets in Some Way Like Our Own,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, March 6, 2009, https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2123.html.

  20.Natalie Batalha, interview with the author.

  21.Michele Johnson, “NASA’s Kepler Mission Announces a Planet Bonanza, 715 New Worlds,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, February 26, 2014, https://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-mission-announces-a-planet-bonanza.

  22.“Exoplanet Anniversary: From Zero to Thousands in 20 Years,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory, October 6, 2015, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4733.

  23.Batalha, interview.

  24.“Star: KOI-961—3 PLANETS,” Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/?f=‘KOI-961’+in+name.

  25.Lee Billings, “Newfound Super-Earth Boosts Search for Alien Life,” Scientific American, April 19, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/newfound-super-earth-boosts-search-for-alien-life/.

  26.Shannon Hall, “This Super-Saturn Alien Planet Might Be the New ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” Space.com, February 3, 2015, https://www.space.com/28435-super-saturn-alien-planet-rings.html.

  27.Andrew Fazekas, “Diamond Planet Found—Part of ‘Whole New Class’?,” National Geographic, October 13, 2012, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121011-diamond-planet-space-solar-system-astronomy-science/.

  28.“Hubble Finds a Star Eating a Planet,” Hubble Space Telescope, May 20, 2010, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/planet-eater.html.

  29.Amelie Saintonge, “How Many Stars Are Born and Die Each Day?,” Ask An Astronomer, last modified June 27, 2015, http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/83-the-universe/stars-and-star-clusters/star-formation-and-molecular-clouds/400-how-many-stars-are-born-and-die-each-day-beginner.

  30.Mike Wall, “Nearly Every Star Hosts at Least One Alien Planet,” Space.com, March 4, 2014, https://www.space.com/24894-exoplanets-habitable-zone-red-dwarfs.html.

  31.Robert Sanders, “Astronomers Answer Key Question: How Common Are Habitable Planets?” University of California, Berkeley, November 4, 2013, http://news.berkeley.edu/2013/11/04/astronomers-answer-key-question-how-common-are-habitable-planets/.

  32.In our paper, we set the pessimism line between 10–24 and 10–22 for technical reasons. Throughout the book, we will use the more conservative value of 10–22. .

  33.Ross Andersen, “Fancy Math Can’t Make Aliens Real,” Atlantic, June 17, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/fancy-math-cant-make-aliens-real/487589/, and Ethan Siegel, “Humanity May Be Alone in the Universe,” Forbes, June 21, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/06/21/humanity-may-be-alone-in-the-universe/.

  34.Adam Frank, “Yes, There Have Been Aliens,” New York Times, June 10, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/yes-there-have-been-aliens.html.

  35.Ernst Mayr, “Can SETI Succeed? Not Likely,” The Planetary Society, http://daisy.astro.umass.edu/~mhanner/Lecture_Notes/Sagan-Mayr.pdf.

  36.Brandon Carter, “The Anthropic Principle and its Implications for Biological Evolution,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 310, no. 1512 (December 1983): 347–63.

  37.It’s worth noting that authors like astrophysicist Mario Livio have presented arguments that undermine the basis for Carter’s work. Mario Livio, “How Rare Are Extraterrestrial Civilizations, and When Did They Emerge?” The As
trophysical Journal 511, no. 1 (1999): 429–31.

  38.Hubert P. Yockey, “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 67, no. 3 (August 7, 1977): 377–98.

  39.Wentao Ma et al., “The Emergence of Ribozymes Synthesizing Membrane Components in RNA-Based Protocells,” Biosystems 99, no. 3 (March 2010): 201–9.

  CHAPTER 5: THE FINAL FACTOR

  1.William Bains. “Many Chemistries Could Be Used to Build Living Systems,” Astrobiology 4, no. 2 (June 2004): 137–67.

  2.J. R. Haas, “The Potential Feasibility of Chlorinic Photosynthesis on Exoplanets,” Astrobiology 10, no. 9 (November 2010): 953–63.

  3.J. Dulcic, A. Soldo, and I. Jardas, “Adriatic Fish Biodiversity and Review of Bibliography Related to Croatian Small-Scale Coastal Fisheries,” http://www.faoadriamed.org/pdf/publications/td15/wp_dulcica.pdf.

  4.Sharon Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 106.

  5.Philip J. Davis, “Carissimo Papà: A Great Fish Story,” SIAM News 38, no. 8 (October 2005).

  6.Kingsland, Modeling Nature, 4.

  7.Mark Kot, Elements of Mathematical Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11.

  8.Kingsland, Modeling Nature, 109.

  9.Kingsland, Modeling Nature, 106–15.

  10.Kingsland, Modeling Nature, 1.

  11.Rafael Reuveny, “Taking Stock of Malthus: Modeling the Collapse of Historical Civilizations,” Annual Review of Resource Economics 4 (2012): 303–29.

  12.Reuveny, “Taking Stock of Malthus,” 303.

  13.Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? (1968; New York: Putnam, 1970).

  14.Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).

  15.James A. Brander and M. Scott Taylor, “The Simple Economics of Easter Island: A Ricardo-Malthus Model of Renewable Resource Use,” American Economic Review 88, no. 1 (March 1998): 119–38.

  16.Bill Basener and David S. Ross, “Booming and Crashing Populations and Easter Island,” SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 65, no. 2 (2004): 684–701.

  17.Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan, “Sustainability and the astrobiological perspective,” Anthropocene 5 (March 2014): 32.