Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology
"It's not easy to unify a multidisciplinary field whose main focus (extraterrestrial life) may not exist, but this new astrobiology book pulls it off. Planets and Life is a well-organized compilation of 28 chapters by 50 contributing authors. Coming from such a disparate group of authors, the quality of the writing is surprisingly uniform and high. ... With so many authors and so many topics, the book could have suffered the fate of being a mixed miscellaneous collage, like so many proceeding volumes, but it doesn't. No two authors, or even a small committee of experts, could have presented so many topics at such a high level. ... the combination of details and big picture thinking embodied in this new text will go far to describe our current understanding of how we came to be and how we fit into the universe." - Charles H. Lineweaver, GeoScience World"Perhaps the book's most impressive achievement is its ability to discuss high-level material over a wide range of disciplines. Drawing on advanced concepts in biology, chemistry, astronomy and even philosophy, Planets and Life effectively provides background for readers whose expertise may lie in a different field. ... Sullivan and Baross do an impressive job of engaging the issues of astrobiology at a high level while keeping the field's guiding questions in full view. ... this book has successfully blazed a trail for the study of astrobiology in university classrooms." - Jeffrey Marlow, Astrobiology Society of Britain