The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World by Peter D. Ward

The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World Reviews

• 
  Jose Moa

  There are many books that tell the history of the earth from its formation to today but few that tell the future of our planet to its end.Peter Ward and Donal Brownlee a paleontologist an an astronomer ,and authors of the grounbreaking book Rare Earth,write a excelent popular book,where they tell the histhory of our planet fom the beguining to the end;after a bief great short part where explains the evolution of earth from its formation to today,the says the following in brief:that the actual ice age will last another ten million years but then the continental drif will change the climate and the ice will be gone forever,the rising temperatures due to the increasing power of sun,roughly one percent every one hundred million years, will increase the wattering of the rocks , this will deplete carbón dioxide near to zero and the photosyntesis will stop in perhaps 700 million years , by that the plants life end and so in another 100 million years the animal life will die;as temperaturas continue to rise the oceans become steam and invade stratosphere where by ultraviolet radiation the wáter molecule is split in hidrogen that escapes gravity and oxigen that remains,by this way the oceans are lost forever and the planet becomes a salty desert;in another two billion years the planet is sterilized of all life and resembles to day Venus,in four more billion years the Sun transforms in a red giant engulfing earth in its atmosphere and the earth will be destroyed in hot gas.In this history we the humans are the wild card and the authors make a warning:"One truth is that this moment on this Earth truly is a precios gift,to be savored and appreciated.If we heedlessly destroy this world,it is unlikely we will find another to replace it.Or be able to get any refuge,even if we could find it."
• 
  Lisa

  Not impressed. Some of the ideas proposed may be good, and certainly the broad outline of the book- that at some point, life will no longer be sustainable on Earth as even planets and stars have a 'life expectancy'- is certainly correct. But as ever, the devil is in the details. I picked up the book because it caught my eye at the library and I was curious. I should have checked the publication date first- parts of the book are already out of date, given the new discoveries being made on a regular basis by astronomers. Other parts are overreach, and a few are just plain incorrect. I wouldn't find inaccurate information so bothersome from a book written by non-scientists, but if you're going to tout your academic credentials and NASA connections, you should get it right. However, my main problem with the book is that the authors speak authoritatively based on a dataset of 1 point- Earth is so far the only planet we have been able to observe that supports life. Extrapolating based on this- and bearing in mind that we are still learning every day about the complex system that is our own planet- how life on planets in general arises, develops, progresses, and ends seems a bit like looking outside, seeing rain, and concluding it rains every day.
• 
  Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle

  I've read a few other of Peter Ward's books, but not one with a coauthor, and I think in this case it was of a huge benefit to him.
  This book is the sort of thing I save for a day where the crushing monotony of petty irritations really get to me, and I need some perspective. It helps to think about the world in a frame we don't have the opportunity to every day, and I personally find it mentally cleansing to ponder.
  The science in here is good, the writing is really good, and the storytelling sections of "travel with us to a time..." are utterly delightful.
  There is a segment of "Under a Green Sky" (another of Ward's books) where he uses this literary device, and it pops up a number of times in this volume. It's clear that he enjoys writing them, and my enjoyment of reading them is amplified accordingly.
  Thinking about the deep past, and the deep future can be overwhelming, maybe depressing in it's way, but it can also offer so much.
  This is the best book I've read so far this year, and I suspect I'll say the same come December. Highly recommended.
• 
  Ushan

  This book says that there is a negative feedback cycle involving plate tectonics, marine organisms, calcium and carbon dioxide that reduces the atmospheric greenhouse effect as the Sun get brighter over billions of years (the presently happening anthropogenic increase is a mere blip that will last as long as the fossil fuels, which is to say negligible time on this scale). When it's done, there won't be enough carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere to support plants. Animals can live without plants, but animals (unlike microbes) can survive only in a narrow range of temperatures; once temperatures rise above the threshold, all animal life will cease. When the Earth gets hotter, the hydrogen from the oceans will evaporate into space (which is now happening at a rate of 1 millimeter per million years, but it will speed up greatly) and Earth will be as dry as Mars; later, the Sun will become a red giant and fry Earth. Readers of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker will appreciate the grandeur, and unlike in the old science fiction novels, it is all true (actually, a lot of charm in old science fiction comes from old science; H. G. Wells's "Under the Knife" was written before it was commonly known that we live in one galaxy out of many; yet I hope they got it right this time).
• 
  Yael

  Has the Earth been here forever? Will it always be here? Has it always been the way we experience it now, and will it always remain that way? Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownless address these questions in The Life and Death of Planet Earth, and the answers they give are both fascinating and disturbing.
  
  No, the Earth has not always been as it is now. In fact, over its 4.6-billion year old history it has gone through many changes, some of them extreme, leading to great mass extinctions. Nor will it remain as it is now in the future. In fact, somewhere between 500 and 3 billion years from now, ultimately all life on Earth will perish, and as Earth ages, it will recapitulate in reverse form its evolution up until the present: the last shall be first and the first, last, unto the end of the world. And at last, some five billion years from now, lifeless and sere, the physical globe of Earth itself may perish completely in the world-devouring fire of the expanding Sun as our day-star goes off the Main Sequence and becomes a red giant star, engulfing its rocky worlds perhaps as far out as Mars.
  
  The Life and Death of Planet Earth is a comprehensive portrait of our world's life and ultimate fate, showing us how the Earth sustains itself and giving us a glimpse of our place in the cosmos. As they describe the process of Earth's evolution from its fiery birth in the nebula which gave rise to the solar system five billion years ago to its equally fiery death in the outer layers of an expanding red giant star that was once our life-giving Sun, they show us that we are living near or shortly after Earth's biological peak. In the future, the process of planetary evolution will reverse itself, and Earthly life as we know it will devolve until only the simplest life-forms are left.
  
  This book gives strong reasons for expanding our civilization into space and taking the rest of our world's life with us. Eventually Earth will no longer be a home for life, and when that happens, Earth's life will continue, if at all, only on other world's or space habitats.
  
  Another wonderful read from the authors of Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, one that anyone interested in the biological and planetary sciences should have in his or her personal library.
• 
  Dennis Littrell

  Bleak but fascinating
  
  It might be that professors Ward and Brownlee are working on a new genre: non-fiction science fiction. Instead of speculations embedded in story form they speculate about the future in a narrative without plot or characterization or other elements of the story form. Of course they are not the only writers doing this, but they are among the best in a growing industry.
  
  Well, what about it? I gave up reading most science fiction years ago because either the story elements were wooden or the science was ridiculous (or both). It is not easy to be simultaneously a master story teller and a polymath of science. We know that (e.g.) Asimov, Clarke and Sagan were exceptions and were able to combine both tale and cutting edge knowledge very well, and in some cases spectacularly well. But their world is gone. Today's science is much more complex. To write convincingly about the future it is not enough to be a world expert in one's chosen field. The future is influenced by science of all kinds; consequently it is requisite that one be an expert in a number of scientific disciplines just to avoid naive projections.
  
  So it is natural that Peter Ward, who is a geologist and zoologist, (and, by the way, a sometimes poetic prose stylist, witness his expositions in Future Evolution [2001]), and Brownlee, who is an astronomer and NASA scientist, might join forces to augment their individual expertise; and that they might eschew the story form in writing about the future.
  
  At any rate, this is an excellent book of speculation about the future of our planet aimed at a general readership. It is a fine follow-up to their Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000). As in that book their conclusions are pessimistic. They concluded in Rare Earth that we are probably alone in the galaxy; here they conclude that we will go extinct without getting beyond our solar system. This bleak prognosis should not unduly trouble us however since our demise by their calculation is at least millions of years in the future, possibly hundreds of millions of years. In fact their scenario reverses the biological experience of the planet: things will get hotter and drier until life necessarily retreats back into the ocean, and then as the oceans evaporate, life forms regress from the complex to the simple until the only life left on the planet is single-celled, as it was three billion years ago. And then of course the sun expands into a red giant and the earth is burned to a crisp.
  
  Is there any escape? Not according to Ward and Brownlee who argue effectively that it is unlikely that we will acquire the ability and the will to even terra form Mars or other places in the Solar System. The idea that we might become interstellar travelers is also quashed as being impractical in the extreme. They conclude "Interstellar travel will likely never happen, meaning we are stranded in this solar system forever." (p. 207)
  
  While I tend to agree with Ward and Brownlee for the most part, as I did with their conclusions in Rare Earth, I think we should realize that their argument in part is a bit beside the point since in millions of years (at most)--not tens of millions, not hundreds of millions and certainly not billions of years--we will no longer be human anyway. The average life span of a species is something like a million years. Because of the incredibly rapid pace of cultural evolution it is highly unlikely that humans as presently constituted will be around in even a thousand years. Some people think we will be part software and part machine before this century is out. Also as science fiction writers have pointed out, the constraints on our species as presently constituted (in terms of our ability to travel in space and to influence cosmic processes) may not apply to the creatures we are becoming.
  
  Ward and Brownlee do not consider this point of view, most likely because it would be extraneous to the scope of their book. So some of their ideas should be considered as stimulative and consciousness-raising, not definitive. As they acknowledge in the epilogue, "Prophecy is a risky business..." (p. 210) Furthermore, most of their material is on the purely physical changes that will take place on planet earth as it evolves toward its ultimate fate, and I have no doubt that the picture that Ward and Brownlee present is as accurate as present knowledge allows.
  
  I was especially intrigued by their discussion of the return of the once and future supercontinent, Gondwanaland, and how its reconfiguration will affect earth's climate. Their exposition on the carbon dioxide cycle and the end of plant life when the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere falls below 10 ppm was also fascinating. The chapter asking the question, "What Trace Will We Leave?" really gives the lie to human vanity, reminding me of the sentiments in Shelley's poem "Ozymandias." If anything, Ward and Brownlee are even more pessimistic than the poet, pointing out that our proud "messages in a bottle" sent into interstellar space are not likely to impact "a planet within a trillion years," by which time there won't be any planets. (p. 186)
  
  While most of the book is very well written and edited, some of the sentences in the later chapters are less carefully constructed. There are even some gaffs. For example on page 192 they repeat an error from their previous book, stating that there are "between 200 million and 300 million" stars in our galaxy, when the number is more like 100 billion plus. Also on page 194 they give the Drake Equation enhanced with new terms they think appropriate, but in fact the equation is without explanation shorter than Drake's Equation given on page 192.
  
  --Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
  
• 
  Kyle Sullivan

  If you've ever wanted to see what the physical embodiment of sobriety looks like, then check out this book. In that, I mean it is a sobering read. You move quite past your own death into the death of everything you regard as normal: blue skies, oceans, animals, bacteria, the sun, our own galaxy (sort of). Nothing is infinite except for the cosmos itself, and we certainly aren't sure about that.
  
  The Life And Death Of Planet Earth is a starting place for anyone interested astrobiology or exobiology, which is to say the hunt for and study of life elsewhere in the universe. Since we haven't found any yet, the game is entirely about prediction. And since we know of no other habitable worlds out there, then Earth (and the unlikely twins, Venus and Mars) serve as a template for the search.
  
  Understanding what to search for means examining the various systems that interconnect here on Earth so that we may recognize them elsewhere. And its surprising how much architecture there is keeping life in the life business here on our blue-green world.
  
  For example, plate tectonics seems to be a crucial element in the global carbon cycle, which regulates the climate of the entire planet by moving carbon around in organic and inorganic circles. Carbon is sequestered deep in the Earth only to be spewed out through volcanic spasms, where it is then traded between the vast tonnage of plant material, the oceans, and captured again in certain types of common rocks. And, of course, some of it ends up in the atmosphere where it traps heat energy from the sun. Plate tectonics is a crucial gear that moves all this carbon around, thus providing a regulation of the Earth's climate and also providing an average global temperature. And without a more or less warm and stable average global temperature, complex life would not exist on Earth as it is now.
  
  It isn't just in moving carbon around that continents make an impact on life. In the regulation of that global temperature, when continents are all bunched up near the poles, Earth is prone to build more, thicker sheets of ice, which takes the climate on a bit of a swing through ice ages. As opposed to only having thinner sea ice, which can lead to long periods of relative warmth. There was even a period of some 250 million years without the hint of an ice age because continents stayed away form the poles. The movement and arrangement of continents and the subduction and creation of tectonic crust plays more than one role in supporting life - or suppressing it.
  
  Does that mean that a potentially habitable planet has to have plate tectonics in order to support life? Jury is out on that and will be for some time. It is a question the book does ask, but not with any real confidence. The assumption of the authors is that everything Earth does and has that supports life must be part of the recipe for searching for life elsewhere. I found this to be unsatisfactory. Considering alternative approaches to habitable worlds is not discussed here. Nor is alternative biological systems, for that matter.
  
  However, the scope of the book is exactly as is promised with the title. This is meant as a starting place for understanding the habitability of a planet. If one wants to understand how a habitable world is possible without the conditions of the present Earth, then one needs to understand how the Earth functions. Its plate tectonics, the moon and its life-regulating protection, the importance of having oceans, the mysterious near-constant levels of oxygen (at 21% of the atmosphere for millions of years despite carbon's mood swings), the exchange between Earth's organic and inorganic systems planet-wide, especially in regards to carbon, even our location in the galaxy - our galaxy's habitable zone - all this and more play a role in understanding why Earth is an oasis of life in the blackness. You will need this base line in order to look out into the universe to see what other tantalizing, alternative possibilities exist.
  
  When studying the inevitable and future death of our great mother, pessimism comes with the territory naturally. I found the authors prospects for interstellar travel and the future of the human species to be lacking in imagination. Humans will certainly figure out much more than the authors realize, which will open all sorts of unexpected doors. But, imagination, while a tool in the science toolkit, is not to be a replacement for the other important tools, like, for example, the the clear-eyed ability of the scientist to see reality as it is.
• 
  Claudia

  This was basically an reality check for those who think humanity is going to have this lovely blue marble always around. Admittedly, we're talking thousands to millions to even billions of years in the future. Our slowing changing planet is in the summer of it's life and autumn is in the distance but it will come.
  
  With a basic introduction with the formation of the Earth, the formation of the atmosphere and the oceans and eventually life which goes through multiple extinctions over the millions of years, the writers then tell how the Earth will eventually return to a ball of rock that is unable to even support the most hardy thermophiles.
  
  The horrors range from a return of the glaciers and Ice Ages, devastation of the oceanic currents with increased fresh water which in turn creates dead zones, plate tectonics merging all land into one continent, the fading of complex plants and animals to simpler versions as CO2 and Oxygen become lesser (CO2 being sequestered in ocean bottoms and limestone while O2 is actually being bled out of the atmosphere). With plants gone, the ground is scoured bare and our blue marble becomes brown.
  
  Eventually our star finishes it's life cycle and the Earth likely spirals into the sun becoming once again the atoms from which it was originally formed. Lovely. Of course, this all occurs billions of years in the future and mankind will not be around. The writers near the end of their book with a few cosmic apocalypse scenarios - the comet/asteroid striking the Earth and gamma burst radiation.
  
  But the real end comes when they discuss the Drake Equation and what factors should be added to really determine if there is life elsewhere in the universe. And of course, they totally squash the idea of humans escaping to the stars. I don't think to be mean, but, as said above, to provide a reality check. Of course, things may change. . .but it's unlikely.
  
  Overall, interesting format. Interesting wordage since they created a few scenarios - the one I like best being the class playing around the Space Needle far in the future disbelieving that a large city once existed in the area as a glacier hundreds of feet high towers nearby.
• 
  Paleoanthro

  A look at how the Earth and the solar system will come to an end. Using paleontology and astrobiology, the authors summarize how it will all come to an end and what will happen to life and the Earth as the Sun reaches its zenith. A forth look at what the future holds...
• 
  Michael

  This book was not meant for me. I am already clutching my head often thanks to the excess wordage and simplified explanations. Thankfully, the core material (the eventual destruction of our planet) is still interesting. I am also glad that the authors chose to postpone talk of terraforming or moving to other planets until the end, as that would have distracted from the primary message of the book.
  
  EDIT: It became less fluffy toward the end and thus I starred it anew. Although, I have to say, the line between realism and pessimism in this book is razor-thin!
• 
  Jason Martin

  A wonderful journey across the 10+ billion year life of our star and our own planet. The authors posit a scientifically sound resolution to our pale blue dot and our own inevitable demise. The best science fiction seems unimaginative compared to the finale of this book! Highly recommended to the scientfically curious and the forward thinking dreamers.
• 
  Joe

  Great book but such a downer! Well, maybe not a downer but completely sobering.
  
  As someone very familar with astrophysics but almost completely ignorant of geology and paleantology, I found this to be an excellent marriage of several disciplines.
  
  All hail, our future stromatalite overlords!
• 
  Stephen Palmer

  Essential reading! This one has inspired me on numerous occasions...
• 
  Jonathan Crowe

  
  My review.
• 
  John

  overall a pretty good book - depressing but good.
• 
  Tapani Aulu

  Perusteos joka antaa hyvän pohjan astrobiologiaan. Todella selkeä yleiskielinen opus, jonka lukee parissa tunnissa.
• 
  James

  Another great job by Peter Ward.