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

by Peter Ward; Don Brownlee

• ISBN13: 9780805067811
• ISBN10: 0805067817
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780805075120
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2003-01-13
• Publisher: Times Books
• More Book Details

Summary

Ward and Brownlee, a geologist and an astronomer respectively, combine their knowledge of what they call the middle-aged planet Earth and tell the story of the second half of its life. In this melding of research and science writing, they provide a comprehensive portrait of Earth's life cycle, and offer a glimpse of its place in the cosmic order.

Author Biography

Peter Ward and Don Brownlee are the co-authors of the acclaimed and bestselling Rare Earth. Ward is a professor of geological science and zoology at the University of Washington and the author of nine other books, including Future Evolution, The Call of Distant Mammoths, and The End of Evolution, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Brownlee is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington.

Table of Contents

Prologue	1	(10)
Our Blink of Time	11	(14)
The Wondrous Machine	25	(24)
The Life Span of Habitable Planets	49	(20)
The Return of the Glaciers	69	(18)
The Return of the Supercontinent	87	(14)
The End of Plant Life	101	(16)
The End of Animals	117	(12)
The Loss of the Oceans	129	(20)
Red Giant	149	(18)
Accidental Armageddon	167	(12)
What Trace Will We Leave?	179	(10)
The Ends of Worlds and the Drake Equation	189	(10)
The Great Escape	199	(10)
Epilogue	209	(6)
Sources	215	(12)
Acknowledgments	227	(2)
Index	229

Excerpts

From The Life and Death of Planet Earth:

There's a difference between a human's life and the life of our planet. Ruth Ward, born in 1916, aged gracefully but never resembled her youth again. Hers was a one-way trip. Planets have a different trajectory—the Earth, for instance, appears to be on a round trip of sorts. If you fire a cannon straight up, the projectile climbs to a certain height, slows, stops, and then falls back to the ground. Our planet's trajectory is similar. It started as a very hot, oxygen-free world. Water, air, plants, solar energy, and plate tectonics created the conditions for natural evolution, and many people assume that the cannonball of biological complexity is still arcing upward. We believe that the cannonball has already begun to drop, and that the Earth has already started a return to a hot world where life becomes less diverse, less complicated, and less abundant through time. The last life on Earth may look much like the first life—a single-celled bacterium, survivor and descendant of all that came before.

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Excerpted from The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World by Peter Douglas Ward, Donald Brownlee
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