Book Reviews
107
an impact origin. Shoemaker visited the Ries Basin that year and mailed samples of suevite, a pumice-like rock that was plentiful in parts of the structure, to Chou. When Chou examined them, he found that they contained coesite, providing further support for a meteorite impact. Although not all of the “old guard” were won over by these findings, the tide was beginning to turn. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Apollo 11 return mission of 1969 played a large role in helping to convince the remaining sceptics. Since the lunar rocks exhibited shock metamorphism features similar to rocks obtained from the Ries Basin, it was concluded that both originated by the same process – meteorite impacts. From that point on, the Ries Basin served as a proxy for the Moon; future Apollo 14 astronauts trained there for their lunar sample-taking mission. Research at the Ries Basin had now gained international planetary significance. Kölbl-Ebert’s book is based on an exhaustive examination of both printed and archival sources as well as interviews with German geologists that she personally conducted, and is extensively told. She not only quotes “lavishly” from these interviews but also provides a full translation of the German original in footnotes. Accompanying the text are 40 representative photographs, many taken by Kölbl-Ebert herself. The story she tells (which is much more complex than that presented here) is an important chapter in impact crater research. A notable contribution to this story is her showing that it was not only purely scientific reasons behind the change from a volcanic to an impact theory, but that political, social, and intellectual factors also played decisive roles. As such, Kölbl-Ebert’s book is a valuable reference work for both historians of science and historians of twentieth-century Germany. Howard Plotkin University of Western Ontario
[email protected] 15
Astrobiology and Cultural Beliefs Astrobiology, History and Society: Life beyond Earth and the Impact of Discovery. Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2013). Pp. xxviii + 375. €107. ISBN 9783642359828.
Are we alone in the universe? If not, then what might that mean? This fascinating volume offers a history of what Western cultures have thought about these questions, a sampling of current work by scientists in astrobiology, and a group of probing essays on how human societies might respond if/when first contact with extraterrestrial life (ETL) or intelligence (ETI) would occur. It is useful to have all this in a single volume – a useful source for scientists, historians, anthropologists, and many other disciplines that concern themselves with these two large questions. I shall discuss only a few examples to illustrate the range of topics. In the historical section, astrobiologists and general readers will find fascinating how much of the enthusiastic embrace of the idea of ETL and ETI, already in the eighteenth century, was based on theological reasoning. So much so that, when Thomas Paine’s
108
Journal for the History of Astronomy 47(1)
rejection of Christian doctrine in his 1793 The Age of Reason used as a major argument the implication that Jesus would need to go to many worlds and be sacrificed again and again to save all those intelligent races, it was a shock to most Christians. They had previously not seen any contradiction – rather they had seen harmonious agreement – between their belief in a beneficent God and his creation of ubiquitous ETL and ETI. John Adams, we learn, abandoned traditional Christianity for deism in 1756 (pp. 29–30), providing further evidence against recent political claims that the US Founding Fathers were all devout Christians. But most of them, while embracing Newton’s God of the cosmic clockwork, explicitly eschewed the doctrine of an individual incarnation sent as saviour exclusively to Earth. Historians will be irked that most of the historical articles cite secondary sources rather than primary, even when the writer is a professional historian, for example, Michael Crowe quoting Thomas Paine (pp. 23–4). But this should not overshadow the wealth of ideas surveyed here. In Dennis Danielson’s fascinating essay, we learn that the enterprise of studying other celestial bodies with telescopes, beginning with Galileo, immediately prompted observers to ask “How would the Earth appear through a telescope?” So entrenched is the narrative of the modern environmental era that only Apollo astronauts viewing Earth from space led to the mental leap of conceiving of the “Whole Earth” as a closed ecological system – that it is eye-opening to see this perspective within a long history of thought rather than being a magical, one-off awakening in the 1960s. Danielson prods us to think hard about the great paradox that reflection about other worlds (and their inhabitants) presents. Do we see the incredible diversity of life on Earth, the impressive scope of (even if not perfect) adaptation, as evidence that life is so ubiquitous in a “biological universe” that we need not fret about trivial local issues such as global climate change only on Earth? Or do we see it, as those Whole Earth-niks did in 1970, as giving “the profound sense of responsibility we ought to have for our own local precious, precarious planet” (p. 70)? Even those who don’t believe in the “Rare Earth” logic might surely find this a bracing reminder. For all the differences of an older view embedded in natural theology, the continuity of ideas from the seventeenth century to the present stands out as Klara Capova reminds us, arguing further that today “the extraterrestrial life hypothesis is … a significant part of the contemporary worldview, constantly shaped by the work and discoveries of science” (p. 274). Capova examines broadcasts, especially films, and asks whether “narratives about the encounter with aliens made the possibility of other life appear to be something to which one can get accustomed?” Have they helped bring us to a place where a violent, xenophobic reaction is less likely? Similarly using anthropological methods, Weigel and Coe suggest that traditional cultures in developing nations may react very differently to the discovery of ETL, even of ETI, than people from Western societies. They propose research to systematically study cultural beliefs in supernatural beings that get involved in human affairs because, they suggest, such information could be used to craft educational programs to help minimize the possibility of shock and negative reactions to first contact in those cultures. This volume nicely reveals the numerous ways in which anthropological knowledge and methods can help us think about and plan for managing the cultural impact of an eventual first contact. There is much thoughtful examination, as in Chapter 16 by Kathryn Denning, of how use of analogies can sometimes be more misleading than helpful in our
109
Book Reviews
thinking about ETI. As a counterbalance to anthropological methods, Denning warns that using modern hunter-gatherers as analogues for Stone Age people leads us, not so benignly, by extension to see them as less culturally evolved than their agriculturalist or industrialist neighbors, and overdue to be superseded. This, of course, mirrors the rationale of nation-states who have forcibly resettled and “modernized” these groups, in a calculated obliteration of their cultures, languages and uniquenesses. (p. 303)
Given the potential for xenophobic reactions to ETI – not to mention our hopes that such ET cultures would not treat us as we have treated “primitive” peoples in our history – we should muster as much self-awareness as we possibly can about the cultural biases we pack into analogies. Other essays speculate on Christianity’s response to the discovery of ETI, on whether the discovery of ETI would provoke a religious crisis, and on mainstream and social media reactions in a wired world. If not completely encyclopaedic, this volume is nonetheless an extremely wide-ranging catalogue of “Life Beyond the Earth and the Impact of Discovery,” as its subtitle suggests. James Strick Franklin & Marshall College
[email protected]
Imagined Conversations with Twentieth-Century Cosmologists Masters of the Universe: Conversations with Cosmologists of the past. Helge Kragh (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015). Pp. xvi + 285. £25. ISBN 9780198722892.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have reached a stage at which cosmological ideas and theories are not more evanescent than, say, our knowledge of the history of the Earth. In fact, in this age of “precision cosmology,” we know the values of some cosmological parameters (such as the age of the universe) with an uncertainty of just a few percent. Advances during the twentieth century have brought into sharp focus details about the origin of the universe, its ultimate fate, and the laws governing it. One of Einstein’s famous aphorisms was “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” The remarkable achievements in exploration and the ensuing understanding of the cosmos have been the collective accomplishments of many physicists, cosmologists, astronomers, and engineers, using a variety of theoretical methods and observational techniques. Still, a few of these scientists stood head and shoulders above the rest in terms of their deep insights, brilliant originality, and superb technical or mathematical acumen. This book tells the fascinating story of a few of those intellectual “magicians.”
