Light of the Stars tells the story of humanity’s coming of age as we awaken to the possibilities of life on other worlds and their sudden relevance to our fate on Earth.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life and intelligence from the ancient Greeks to the leading thinkers of our own time.
Light of the Stars traverses a wide terrain of geological, biological and astronomical science, with emphasis on the history of terrestrial climate change and the factors causing those changes, and includes portraits of such scientists as Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Lynn Margulis and others, said a review published in the New York Times.
The book is divided into two parts. One is a review of environmental science and a history of climate change on Earth.
The other concerns the new field of astrobiology, with results from the Kepler satellite, launched in 2009 with the specific mission of looking for undiscovered solar systems.
Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester.
