Here be Dragons.
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   Science is a detective story.
Ancient cartographers wrote "Hic sunt dracones"
on the unexplored lands of their maps, "here
be dragons".
   Looking up in the night sky. One might indeed
wonder if there are dragons up there.
   Authors David Koerner and Simon LeVay
offers a wide-ranging overview of the search for
ETs in the universe. 
   Lets say life follows the NASA definition: "selfsustained
chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution",
then it is interesting to see how relatively easy
the habitats and requirements for life is fulfilled.
   Even lifeless planets like Mars (?) might relatively easy
be terraformed by changing its atmospheric conditions so that
it could sustain terrestrial life and eventually become
habitable by humans. According to Imre Friedmann all
it would take is a few simple chemical and physical methods
along with some terrestrial microorganism to speed up the
climatic change.
   But even in our solar system we might not have to
introduce life ourselfes to a planet. Some might have it already.
   Europa, one of the moons of Jupitor,  might possess
an icecovered ocean. With all the right ingredients
for life down in a dark ocean.
   Another likely candidate is the Saturn moon Titan.
Even tough it seems a pretty cold place at minus 178 degress
Celcius. In its atmosphere one is likely to find 
amino acids, nucleotide bases and many other building
blocks of life.
   So even if our solar system only has life on Earth the
process itself of life might be possible in other
places as well.
   Looking out in the Galaxy the right conditions
seems likely to exist in a lot of places.

   And surely all the other stars must have planets.
In a little  treat of a chapter authors Koerner and
Levay makes the case:
"When a star is formed from the original core of dust and gas, 
it is likely to be rotating, even if only at a slow speed.
Therefore it has angular momentum. As the material
collapses inward, the angular momentum must be preserved.
And that causes the rate of spin to increase,
as does a spinning ice skater when she pulls in her
arms and legs. If all the material of the collapsing
region ended up inside the star, the stars rotation
would be so great as to make it break apart.
Therefore meterial must be left orbiting the star as a disk.
Planets will be there !" (page 97).

   If there is life then according to
Simon Conway Morris evolution lead again and again
to identical traits. Life gravitates to some
tiny corner of potential morphospace, because thats
were the good designs are.

   Intelligent life might follow the famous Drake equation
    N = R*Fp*Ne*Fl*Fi*Fc*L

   Which Drake himself simplifies to 
   N = L .

   The number of communicating civiliations in our
galaxy equals the average lifetime of such a civilisation.

   That is life as we know it. Still a number of other 
possibilities (infinite ?) exists.
   
    Take life on an neutron star. A neutron star is
the superdense remnant of a supernova explosion.
The original star collapses to a state were gravity over-
comes repulsion between electrons and protons.
They then fuses forming a sea of neutrons.
Life there could exists as patterns of bounded neutrons.
With a breakneck speed of metabolism. Where organism
live and die within 10e-15 seconds. Entire civilisations
might be formed within a fraction of second.
     Advanced civilisation might create such neutron
stars in order to use them as computers. Some 10e30 times
more powerful than the human brain.

    The authors stop here - but I would think it 
relevant to speculate further on installing computers
in spacetime itself, just taking the neutron star example
one step further to a black hole, that explodes
into a new universe (big bang) with the order (computer)
installed in its very fabric of space time.
    But of course these are the post-biological species. First
we must find the other biological species.

    The book "Here be dragons" is highly recomended
as it takes on the interesting questions: Who are we ?
Where do we come from ? Are we alone ?
     There are many explanation systems: myths, spirit worlds,
religion and answers grounded in philosophy and reasoning.
Reasoning aided by observation and experiment (=science)
is what this book is all about. And it does a splendid
job.

March 3rd 2001
-Simon Laub    

entered as review on amazon.com 03/03/2001