| BEYOND Our Future in Space Chris Impey New York: W. W. Norton & Co., April 2015 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-393-23930-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-393-23930-6 | 321pp. | HC/BWI | $27.95 | |
| Page 6: | "A four-letter alphabet of base pairs encodes the unique function and form of every organism. |
| Word order: S/B "form and function". This is a purely stylistic change. |
| Page 36: | "The Manhattan Project [...] had been so secret that Vice President Harry Truman was unaware of its existence, but it was riddled with spies. |
| I know about the Rosenbergs and Klaus Fuchs, but I'm not sure I'd use the term "riddled." Wikipedia lists 10 Manhattan Project spies, including the three I mentioned. Some others have never been identified. I guess this is just a quibble. |
| Page 41: | JFK quote: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely." |
| Missing words: S/B "and returning him safely to the Earth". |
| Page 43: | "Space travel in the early days was risky." |
| It still is. |
| Page 43: | "The giant rocket was 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty (Figure 10.)" |
| Figure 10 compares the Saturn V with the N1/L3 rocket of the USSR. The Statue of Liberty is not shown. |
| Page 49: | "Before 1610, the planets were just nontwinkling dots that drifted across a celestial backdrop. |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "non-twinkling". It really hurts to have your nont winkled. |
| Page 50: | "Now we know the Moon's age to within an accuracy of a percent..." |
| Terminology: S/B "to within an accuracy of 1 percent" or better "to within 1 percent". |
| Page 53: | "...moons as dark as soot and as bright as a mirror." |
| I'm unfamiliar with any moon as bright as a mirror, and Dr. Impey doesn't name it or them. |
| Page 55: | "The U.S. military lost patience with the anemic launch schedule and the fact that two out of five orbiters had been lost catastrophically, so they developed their own heavy-lift capability... |
| Events out of sequence. Air Force Secretary Edward Aldridge began developing more capable expendable boosters for military satellites after Challenger was lost. |
| Page 59: | "Floating in the Hub, the Earth is a blue-and-white bauble nestled in black velvet." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "I see the Earth as". |
| Page 68: | "A flying object such as a bird, a plane, or a rocket is engaged in a constant tug-of-war among opposing forces. [...] The upward force is lift, provided by air flowing over a wing. |
| This description does not apply to rockets, because they have no wings. |
| Pages 68-9: | "...when he ascended to 24 miles in a balloon that was three times the height of a commercial jet. |
| Confusing: probably S/B "balloon; that was three times the height at which commercial jets fly". |
| Page 70: | "This boundary is called the Kármán line. |
| S/B "the von Kármán line". |
| Page 129: | "Evidence suggests that within this diversity are some planets that are just like home." |
| This seems a bit of an exaggeration. |
| Page 130: | "...then 100,000 stars must be monitored to detect a few dozen Earths. |
| Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't make this math work out. |
| Page 143: | "Their Long March rocket is original and has quickly eclipsed Russian rockets" |
| Again, I must have missed the eclipse. |
| Page 153: | "Telstar was launched in 1962 [...] It's goal was to relay TV signals.. |
| Punctuation: S/B "Its goal". |
| Page 171: | "But on our planet most of the carbon dioxide is built into rocks and dissolved in the oceans, making them mildly acidic and..." |
| Incorrect: by definition the oceans are alkaline, not acidic, since they have a pH value higher than 7. I would remove this phrase entirely. (It is true the oceans are becoming more acidic, but they are still on the high side of pH 7.) |
| Page 187: | "Radio waves aren't naturally produced by stars, so radio waves appearing from a star could only come from an artificial source next to the star. |
| Wrong. Should specify the type of radio waves: narrowband signals or pulses (that don't come from a pulsar.) |
| Page 189: | "It will be easier to decide that a radio signal is artificial in origin than to decode the meaning in the signal. If you doubt that, recall that we can't communicate with primates that share 99 percent of our DNA." |
| Irrelevant: primates cannot compose a radio message at all, let alone one designed to be understood by aliens. |
| Page 205: | "We've already met a modern-day cyborg in the form of Tony Stark, aka Elon Musk." |
| Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, is a fictional character. He's said to be patterned after Elon Musk, but Musk is not a cyborg. (If we're playing with fictional cyborgs, I'll see your Tony Stark and raise you Michael Rennie's character in Cyborg 2087.) |
| Page 217: | "Water vapor is also a biomarker, since we assume that life cannot exist without water." |
| It's true that life (as we know it) cannot exist without water, but water vapor can exist without life. |
| Page 218: | "To anyone who had a cultural memory of the African savanna, the sight of the wild, windswept shore of Patagonia, with the stars in the night sky wheeling in the opposite direction, would have seemed as alien as an exoplanet." |
| Um, no — the stars would still rise in the east and sink in the west. So would the Sun and the Moon. |
| Page 219: | "On this scale, the nearest star to the Sun is 30,000 miles from the little Ping-Pong ball, or more than the Earth's circumference." |
| Mixes model and reality: S/B "or more than the real Earth's circumference". |
| Page 223: | "Unfortunately, 10 million gigawatts is more than the energy consumption of all countries on Earth. |
| Mixing units: Gigawatts are power, not energy. Also, the "G" should be capitalized. |
| Page 236: | "It's referred to as 'The Great Silence,' as if radio waves were audible or sound could travel through space." |
| Suddenly, Impey goes literal on us. Did he never watch a show in which the commandos are ordered to "maintain radio silence"? |
| Page 236: | "Stars are the targets because their attendant planets wouldn't be visible..." |
| We're talking about radio signals here. We don't have to see the signal sources, only "hear" the signals. Dr. Impey — ya got your ears on, good buddy? |
| Page 236: | "The astronomer Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, is in the control room of the Very Large Array..." |
| No; she's sitting on the hood of her car out among the VLA dishes, wearing headphones, when she first hears the Vegan signal. If you're going to describe a scene from a movie, you ought to get it right. |
| Page 237: | "Natural sources of radio waves like pulsars and quasars spread their signals over a relatively broad frequency range." |
| Pulsars are (wait for it...) neutron stars. So stars do produce radio waves, just not the narrow-band waves that characterize an artificial source. |
| Page 240: | "The Fermi question is provocative because it takes the failure of SETI and turns it into a poignant silence." |
| Wait; I thought "silence" was an inappropriate term for the absence of signals from ET aliens. |
| Page 243: | "At that point, surely, continuing Great Silence means we're alone." |
| No. Just no. Even twenty years after full capability of the Allen Array, there will still be plenty of room on the outside. Besides, radio is not the only method we know to signal across interstellar distances — and, as the author mentions in the next paragraph, there may be methods we haven't thought of to date. |
| Page 253: | "The idealized concept of a hollow sphere around a star is physically unstable (in Larry Niven's Ringworld series of science fiction novels, this instability causes a collapse of the civilization)..." |
| No; the Ringworld civilization collapsed because a mold or fungus ate the room-temperature superconductors that powered its devices, especially the receivers that channeled power from the shadow squares. The orbital instability does threaten the Ringworld, but Louis Wu and his intrepid companions manage to fix things. |
| Page 256: | "...if any of these quantities took different values, it wouldn't be a universe with life containing life as we know it." |
| Extra words: S/B "a universe containing life". |
| Page 259: | "...and they've noted that only the wealthy will benefit from radical-life-extension technology. |
| But... why would the wealthy benefit from extending the lives of radicals? You'd think it would chap their hides to have Saul Alinsky or Angela Davis around for century upon century. But seriously, this has an extra hyphen: S/B "radical life-extension". |
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