Look for the Improbable in Extraterrestrial Life

To land a spacecraft on Europa, with the heavy equipment needed to penetrate the ice and explore the ocean directly, would be a formidable undertaking. A direct search for life in Europa's ocean would today be prohibitively expensive. But just as asteroid and comet impacts on Mars have given us an easier way to look for evidence of life on that planet, impacts on Europa give us an easier way to look for evidence of life there. Every time a major impact occurs on Europa, a vast quantity of wat...

 Science is a Relay Race

Indeed, there is a particular problem with finding endings in science. Where do these science stories really finish? Science is truly a relay race, with each discovery handed on to the next generation. Even as one door is closing, another door is already being thrown open. So it is with this book. The great period of Victorian science is about to begin. The new stories are passed into the hands of Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Charles Darwin …and the world of modern science begins to rush...

 Herschel's Heterodox Opinions

Laplace’s cool confidence in avowing atheistical sentiments was legendary. The story was told that after Napoleon had inspected a copy of Laplace’s Systéme du Monde, he challenged the astronomer about his beliefs. ‘Monsieur Laplace! Newton has frequently spoken of God in his book. I have already gone over yours, and I have not found His name mentioned a single time.’ To this Laplace made the magnificent and disdainful reply: ‘Citizen First Consul, I have no need of that hypothesis....

 John Adams and the Doctrinal Challenge of Extraterrestria...

Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel’s new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the moral implications of there being a ‘plurality of worlds’. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his ...