Worlds without End : Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity

Impey, Chris

MIT Press（2023/04発売）

MIT Press（2023/04発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 304 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780262047661
• DDC分類 523.24

Full Description

The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home.

Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds without End is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life.
 
With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what's behind this accelerating progress, what's next, and what it might mean for humanity's future.
 
The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.

Contents

Prologue: The Best of All Possible Worlds 1
I Searching for Distant Worlds 5
1 The Visionaries 7
2 Doppler Wobble 17
3 Chasing Shadows 27
4 Seeing Is Believing 37
5 Calling Pandora 47
6 The Next Wave 57
7 Milky Way Census 67
II Habitability and the Exoplanet Zoo 77
8 Gas Giants 79
9 Ice Giants 87
10 Water Worlds 95
11 Earth Clones 107
12 Exomoons 117
13 Rogue Planets 127
III The Search for Life beyond Earth 137
14 The Solar System 139
15 Sniffing Biosignatures 151
16 Send in the Nanobots 163
17 E.T. Phone Home 173
18 Energy Footprints 183
19 The Drake Equation 193
20 The Fermi Question 203
IV The Promise of Space Exploration 213
21 Habitable Earth 215
22 Space Boom 227
23 How to Get to Space 237
24 Going to the Moon and Marc 249
25 Mining Asteroids 261
26 Living beyond Earth 271
Epilogue: Scenes from the Future 283
Acknowledgments 289
Notes 291
Index 347