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Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, by Lee Billings
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“A definitive guide to astronomy’s hottest field.” —The Economist
Since its formation nearly five billion years ago, our planet has been the sole living world in a vast and silent universe. But over the past two decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of “exoplanets,” including some that could be similar to our own world, and the pace of discovery is accelerating.
In a fascinating account of this unfolding revolution, Lee Billings draws on interviews with the world’s top experts in the search for life beyond earth. He reveals how the search for exoplanets is not only a scientific challenge, but also a reflection of our culture’s timeless hopes, dreams, and fears.
- Sales Rank: #479633 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-10-03
- Released on: 2013-10-03
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
In his efforts to put a human face on the grand hunt for "life among the stars"—or at least a planet where life could exist—science writer Billings loses sight of the search and gets caught up in historical asides, profiles of scientists, and distracting poetic musings. His approach is novel, but all too often the results resemble just that—that is, a novel: Billings relies on interviews with researchers—including Frank Drake of the SETI ("search for extraterrestrial intelligence") Institute, MIT's Sara Seager, and the preeminent discoverer of extrasolar planets, UC Berkley's Geoff Marcy—conducted in relaxed settings: a home in Santa Cruz, a Pennsylvania farm, a family evening in Concord, Mass. Wherever his interviewees skim the surface, Billings fills readers in on the science behind the story. If he had stuck to this format, the book might havewould've worked. Instead, he muddles the narrative with chapters on, for example, the history of astronomy in the Western world and the early epochs of Earth; these topics have been covered better elsewhere. And in his section on Seager, Billings dwells longer on the tragic death of her husband than on her work. The individual pieces are interesting, but they fail to cohere. Agent: Peter Tallack, Science Factory (U.K.). (Oct. 3)
From Booklist
When scientists first began an ambitious search for extraterrestrial radio signals in the early 1960s, the space race was in full swing and government funding for NASA’s pet projects was enthusiastically openhanded. Today, the formerly heralded project known as SETI garners a fraction of its once sizable budget, and instead, astronomers are spending more time peering outside our solar system to pinpoint distant worlds dubbed exoplanets. Lately, barely a month passes without the media announcing a new discovery. Exoplanet detection is space science’s hottest field, one which science writer Billings surveys here with exceptional clarity while peering over the shoulders of the planet hunters’ leading pioneers. Along with an absorbing history of celestial-body sightings from the Greeks to Galileo, Billings profiles colorful contemporary researchers, such as astrophysicist Greg Laughlin, who assesses planets’ values based on their available resources (Earth’s weigh in at $5 quadrillion), and astronomer Matt Mountain, who has been lobbying Washington for a billion-dollar space telescope. A fascinating and informative read for both casual and serious astronomy buffs. --Carl Hays
Review
“Graceful... the best book I have read about exoplanets, and one of the few whose language approaches the grandeur of a quest that is practically as old as our genes."
—New York Times Book Review
“Will leave readers who aren’t rocket scientists slack-jawed”
—New York Times
“Billings performs a brilliant sleight of hand…the ending is a poignant reminder that humankind may yet find a way to the stars, but people — the ones we know, the ones we love, the ones we lose — are our entire history and our full universe.”
—The Washington Post
"The search for Earth-like worlds orbiting distant stars is just a step in the age-old quest to learn whether or not we are alone in the universe. In his compelling, wide-ranging survey, Billings steps back to look at this broader picture, largely through richly textured portraits of some of the giants of the field...[an] extraordinary tale of scientific discovery."
—Scientific American
“Fascinating… A great outline of the subject, bringing what's often treated as science fiction down to Earth where it can be understood.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Exoplanet detection is space science’s hottest field, one which science writer Billings surveys here with exceptional clarity while peering over the shoulders of the planet hunters’ leading pioneers…a fascinating and informative read for both casual and serious astronomy buffs.”
—Booklist
“Readers will find [Five Billion Years of Solitude] incredibly engaging…Billings has created a book that is not only entertaining, but educational as well.”
– Universe Today
“Billings communicates scientific and technical detail fluently, and there is much here to please any geek who does not already know how, say, it is possible to see a distant planet next to a star that outshines it as an exploding nuclear bomb does an unlit match.”
—The Guardian
“Astrobiology, the study of alien life, has been a dream—until now. Suddenly the detection of life on other planets no longer seems quite so peculiar. Lee Billings explains how the impossible dream became possible after all.”
—The Economist “Books of the year”
Most helpful customer reviews
52 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
Superb Investigation of Exoplanetary Science
By Paul A. Gilster
About a third of the way into his new book Five Billion Years of Solitude (Current, 2013), Lee Billings describes a time capsule that was sealed in July of 1963 near the Cabrillo Freeway in San Diego, though it has since been moved. Within it was a book that looked a century ahead, with contributions from politicians, astronauts, military figures and others about the world of the future. Copies of the book, titled 2063 A.D. are available, and within them one can find the musings of Nobel-laureate Harold Urey, who worried about our use of energy and noted that largely because of the need for electricity, US fossil fuel consumption had increased eightfold between 1900 and 1955.
Was the trend sustainable over the long haul? Urey doubted it, and he was hardly alone, for the need for energy seems to impose sharp limits on what a society can do. Billings notes the work of Tom Murphy (UC San Diego), who works with a long-term 2.3 percent increase in energy usage per year, yielding a factor-of-ten increase every century. Things happen quickly over time -- by 2112 the world is consuming 120 terawatts, a number that rises to 1200 by 2212. Cover every bit of land with photovoltaic solar arrays and assume 20 percent efficiency and you can supply the world of 2287, which will need something on the order of 7,000 terawatts.
You can see where this is going, and Billings is expert at connecting the march of numbers with real events and the people who can explain them. First, here is what happens once we've got all that land covered with solar-power arrays:
"From there, increasing the efficiency of the photovoltaics to a miraculous 100 percent and covering the oceans as well as the continents would allow the 2.3 percent annual growth in energy use to persist for another 125 years, taking our steadily growing civilization into A.D. 2412 before it outpaced the total amount of sunlight falling upon the Earth. Another energy source, nuclear fusion, could potentially sustain an annual 2.3 percent growth rate for some centuries beyond this, at least until the waste heat from the vast amount of power being produced evaporated the oceans and turned Earth's crust to glowing slag. For a planet-bound civilization, the boiling point of water and the melting points of rock and metal place insurmountable limits upon the expansion of energy use."
A grim prospect, but perhaps an informative one. Talking to planet hunter Gregory Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz), Billings brings up the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a bit out of Laughlin's wheelhouse considering that he spends most of his days teasing out the faint signatures of distant exoplanets, leaving SETI to those who specialize in it. Intriguingly, though, Laughlin tells him that if a SETI detection ever does come, it will likely be extragalactic.That, of course, is a mind-boggling thought, but it follows directly out of the energy constraints above.
After all, Freeman Dyson came up with `Dyson spheres' in their various configurations as a way of solving the energy problem, at least for a time. A Dyson sphere or `shell' operates through a cloud of energy collectors completely surrounding the parent star, perhaps constructed by dismantling entire planets. A galaxy in which Dyson sphere building on a massive scale was occurring would be an interesting one indeed, gradually dimming in the optical while infrared from the enclosing shells became more and more apparent. There have been, in fact, searches made to look for signatures like these, though so far to little effect. James Annis (FermiLab) has studied 137 galaxies looking for candidates for this kind of engineering, and we are on the cusp of further studies looking for what Andrei Kardashev once described as Type III civilizations.
A Dyson sphere, according to Billings, would capture about 400 billion petawatts of power, equalling the Sun's output, but even here that 2.3 percent growth in energy use catches up with us. A single Dyson sphere can no longer meet its builders' energy needs after a millennium at this rate, while within about 2500 years, we would be using the energy of an entire galaxy. Billings asks whether the fact that we don't see stars or galaxies dimming into the infrared may not be telling us something profound about our own expectations of exponential growth. That ever increasing upturn in our charts of the future may, over time, be the result of a temporary historical anomaly.
Although I've focused on a specific question out of Five Billion Years of Solitude, it's a deliberate attempt to get at the jewel-like complexity of the larger work. Open to a page at random and you will find the kind of issues we kick around here on Centauri Dreams under discussion by some of the top minds in the field. Moreover, Billings has a twin purpose. He's out to illustrate the vistas being opened to us by our exoplanet explorations (and by astrophysics at large) while putting us in touch with many of the remarkable individuals who ply this trade, some of whom may be the first to identify a planet like our own around another star, and perhaps the first to find unmistakable signs of life in its atmosphere.
Thus we meet Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma launched the SETI effort and whose Drake Equation has helped us understand the factors involved in searching for life. Billings' account of the small SETI conference convened at the Green Bank observatory in West Virginia in 1961 gives us the origins of the equation and its reception among an audience that included such stellar figures as Philip Morrison, Bernard Oliver, John Lilly, a young Carl Sagan and Harold Urey himself, whose Nobel had come from his discovery of deuterium. The Green Bank conference was all about whether SETI made sense, whether there was a serious possibility of detecting signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, and we've been parsing the problem ever since.
Billings is expert at finding the telling detail, which in Drake's case may be his love of orchids (he maintains over 200 hanging in pots and strewn over tables in the greenhouses outside his Santa Cruz home). Even more striking, though, is the stump of a giant redwood that he used to explain growth over time to his children, counting tree rings that extended back 2000 years. What I love about Five Billion Years of Solitude is the way Billings can work with an object like this and its multi-millennial reach while then extracting the larger cosmological message. In the passage that follows, he moves with panache from Earth years to galactic time-frames:
"Over the course of the tree's 2,000-year existence, the Milky Way had fallen nearly five trillion miles closer to its nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, Andromeda, yet the distance between the two galaxies remained so great that a collision would not occur until perhaps 3 billion years in the future. In 2,000 years, the Sun had scarcely budged in its 250-million-year orbit about the galactic center, and, considering its life span of billions of years, hadn't aged a day. Since their formation 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun and its planets have made perhaps eighteen galactic orbits-- our solar system is eighteen "galactic years" old. When it was seventeen, redwood trees did not yet exist on Earth. When it was sixteen, simple organisms were taking their first tentative excursions from the sea to colonize the land. In fact, fossil evidence testified that for about fifteen of its eighteen galactic years, our planet had played host to little more than unicellular microbes and multicellular bacterial colonies, and was utterly devoid of anything so complicated as grass, trees, or animals, let alone beings capable of solving differential equations, building rockets, painting landscapes, writing symphonies, or feeling love."
This is fine stuff, and you will find passages to equal it throughout the book. Along the way, Billings speaks not only to Drake and Gregory Laughlin, but to Geoff Marcy, to Jim Kasting. He talks paleoclimatology with sedimentary geologist Mike Arthur (Pennsylvania State) and ponders space telescope breakthroughs with Matt Mountain, who directs the Space Telescope Science Institute. With Terrestrial Planet Finder in its confusing multiplicity of forms still on ice and starshade proposals for JWST still in the realm of theory rather than practice, Wesley Traub (JPL) explains the maddening frustrations of trying to design cutting-edge equipment. We may not see a true Terrestrial Planet Finder until the 2030s, but that doesn't mean the effort stops. We still have missions like TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) in the works.
Billings' conversations with Sara Seager (MIT) offer a wonderful segue from crisis into opportunity. Seager began as a cosmologist but swiftly switched to working on exoplanets with Dimitar Sasselov at Harvard. Moving increasingly toward questions of astrobiology and how to characterize habitable planets, she has been a tireless conference organizer and advocate for exoplanetary studies at a time of budgetary crisis. Her "The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets" conference at MIT's Media Lab in May of 2011 was in several respects a call to arms, and Billings was there to hear her exhortation: "So I convened all of you here, and that's why we're recording this, because we want to make an impact and we want to make that happen. We are on the verge of being those people, not individually but collectively, who will be remembered for starting the entire future of other Earth-like worlds. That's why we're here."
I wasn't at the MIT conference but did follow most of it via online streaming, and I still recall Geoff Marcy's anger at the lack of progress that had been exemplified by the failure to follow through with Terrestrial Planet Finder, the interferometric version in particular. It was at this conference that Marcy called for an Alpha Centauri probe "even if it takes a few hundred years or a thousand years to get there." Such a mission would, he believed, energize and engage young people and jolt a moribund NASA into new life, and it would draw amply on international resources.
But Seager's announcement that she was going to be devoting a substantial part of her time to the commercial spaceflight industry surprised many in the audience. Seager has a get-the-job-done approach that focuses on solutions no matter how far afield they may take her. As depicted in Billings' shrewd and graceful prose, she is a complex, driven scholar with a taste for outdoor adventure and a habit of endless invention. If NASA won't build a TPF, why not build Seager's ExoplanetSat, on the model of one tiny satellite with telescope and solar panels focusing in on a single star at a time. Fly them in their hundreds on the cheap. Get things done.
You get to know these people through Billings' words, and he's adept at capturing their voice for extended quotations, letting them have the lead in describing their own work. In addition to the character portraits that inevitably emerge, the book is studded with the tools and concepts of exoplanetology. It is a poignant and inspiring look at an emerging discipline that mixes the human triumphs and foibles of key scientists (watch them fight over who discovered what) with a scholarly rigor -- someone just coming upon the exoplanet field will find everything from planet detection to spectroscopy, habitability, geology and climate laid out with precision. I am hard pressed to think of any book I have read so voraciously, and with such continuing admiration.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A work of great value
By Shalom Freedman
This book opens with the visit of the author to Frank Drake the great pioneer of the search for Extraterrestial Life. In this chapter Lee Billings tells the story of SETI's getting underway and outlines the roles of the various distinguished scientists present in a key first meeting among whom were Drake, Philip Morrison, Harold Urey,Joshua Lederberg and a young and most optimistic Carl Sagan. For this riveting chapter alone the book is worthwhile. In it Billings also explains why SETI has in a sense gone out of fashion and why scientific enthusiasm in astrophysics focuses in good part on the search for Exoplanets. Very simply fifty years of SETI have yielded nothing in the way of concrete results, while in the past twenty years or so there have been revealed close to one- thousand exoplanets including most recently those earth- like in size.
Still even in this area as Billings will go on to relate Progress is not where it could be. One major theme of the book is that Humanity and most especially its leading nations are not properly invested in the kind of tools and equipment that could more deeply investigate the Exoplanents. The tools are not available now to know which planets are good candidates for sustaining life. We cannot now read their biosignatures, cannot know whether they have liquid water, suitable atmospheres, methane.oxygen etc.
Billings too talks about the search for exoplanents in a series of conversations with leading researchers. These conversations are valuable both in exploring the complicated nature of the search for Life in other worlds, and presenting portraits of the individual scientists.
One of the surprising and most appealing elements in the book is Billings meditations on the whole question of human Aloneness and the search for life. He understands how difficult our discovery of other civilizations might be, and how difficult for us our failure to discover them might be. He understands the pain Humanity felt in losing its sense of itself as central in the universe, living as it does in a not -special place in the Universe. He understands too the awesome responsibility that could be involved should Humanity be in fact the only Intelligent Life in the Galaxy. He on the other hand has no doubt that in order to survive Humanity must move out into Space. And in fact the Five Billion Years of Solitude which is the poetic title of this work, refers to the time 4.6 billion years we have been here, and the additional approximately half- billion years in which complex life will be possible here. He speaks of us being in a critical time and the importance of making these moves into Space as soon as possible.
This book will be of great value to readers who have real concern about the nature of our Universe and the character of the human future.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Will we squander the unbounded future of humankind?
By David C. Mosher
That's the implicit question that permeates the book. Thankfully, Lee Billings shows up with relatable characters, engrossing narrative, artful prose, and careful explanations to help us formulate an answer.
Billings begins his journey with the father of exoplanetology: None other than Sir Francis Drake. We visit Drake's greenhouse and, inside, we come to appreciate the fragility and rarity of our planet -- a rare orchid -- as well as others that may exist as tiny specks hidden amid the void of space. From there we steer through the rise of exoplanetology and frustrating bureaucracies that impede the search for habitable extraterrestrial planets. We also learn what makes Earth so special (even its estimated value in dollars!) and how, exactly, we detect extrasolar planets. Billings also clearly explains what future technologies are required to detect life on distant worlds -- perhaps the most important pursuit ever undertaken by the human race.
As a science and technology writer, I consider myself well-versed on the subject matter in the book. But Billings kept me glued, page after page, by distilling and clearly describing so much that I was previously unaware of. It almost felt like I knew nothing prior to reading his book. He made everything click.
If you're interested a candid, detailed, and fascinating portrayal of how scientists go about finding exoplanets -- and what is at stake in continuing the search -- I wholeheartedly recommend reading Five Billion Years of Solitude.
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