Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey Among the Exoplanets in Search of Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781588346643)

The captivating possibilities of extraterrestrial life on exoplanets, based on current scientific knowledge of existing worlds and forms of life

It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring readers on a marvelous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life--unlike anything we have experienced so far--that could exist on planets outside our own solar system.

Life could be out there in many forms: on frozen worlds, living in liquid oceans beneath ice and communicating (and even battling) with bubbles; on super-dense planets, where they would have evolved body types capable of dealing with extreme gravity; on tidally locked planets with one side turned eternally toward a star; and even on "rogue worlds," which have no star at all. Yet this is no fictional flight of fancy: the authors take what we know about exoplanets and life on our own world and use that data to hypothesize about how, where, and which sorts of life might develop. Imagined Life is a must-have for anyone wanting to learn how the realities of our universe may turn out to be far stranger than fiction.

Author: James Trefil, Michael Summers
ISBN-10: 1588346641
ISBN-13: 9781588346643
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Language: English
Published: 09/17/2019
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.06lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/15/2019
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2019
Library Journal 08/01/2019 pg. 119
Booklist 08/01/2019 pg. 10