Aktion	Zweigstelle	Standorte	Status	Frist	Vorbestellungen
Vorbestellen	Zweigstelle: 05., Pannaschg. 6	Standorte: NN.SS FS.E Impe	Status: Verfügbar	Frist:	Vorbestellungen: 0

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 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 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. (Verlagstext)

 

Table of contents:

 

Prologue: The Best of All Possible Worlds 1

Searching for Distant Worlds 5

The Visionaries 7

Doppler Wobble 17

Chasing Shadows 27

Seeing Is Believing 37

Calling Pandora 47

The Next Wave 57

Milky Way Census 67

Habitability and the Exoplanet Zoo 77

Gas Giants 79

Ice Giants 87

Water Worlds 95

Earth Clones 107

Exomoons 117

Rogue Planets 127

The Search for Life beyond Earth 137

The Solar System 139

Sniffing Biosignatures 151

Send in the Nanobots 163

E.T. Phone Home 173

Energy Footprints 183

The Drake Equation 193

The Fermi Question 203

The Promise of Space Exploration 213

Habitable Earth 215

Space Boom 227

How to Get to Space 237

Going to the Moon and Mars 249

Mining Asteroids 261

Living beyond Earth 271

Epilogue: Scenes from the Future 283

Acknowledgments 289

Notes 291

Index 347