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Is life on our planet unique in space? And do we know how to find out? Cait MacPhee ponders
The Copernicus Complex: The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)significance By Caleb Scharf Allen Lane, 288pp, £20.00 ISBN 9781846147128 Published 4 September 2014
I have a list of things to see and do before I die. Some of them I've managed to complete: I've slept underground in a hotel constructed from a former opal mine in Coober Pedy; I've seen the sun rise over Monument Valley and watch fog roll into the Grand Canyon; and courtesy of a recent flight I've now seen the aurora borealis from a plane window. Thanks to astronomer Caleb Scharf's The Copernicus Complex, I've had to add a new one to my list: to see the zodiacal light. This is sunlight scattered from the sparse interplanetary grains of dust that form a cloud between Mercury and Jupiter, the leftovers of the cosmic chaos that formed our solar system. It's seen at dusk and just before dawn in some of the most remote places on Earth, which neatly ties in with my desire to visit the Paranal Observatory in Chile. One day.
In his latest book, Scharf seeks to work out whether we - the biological inhabitants of Earth - are significant. Are we, our planet and our solar system so normal and mundane that we should expect to see living planets distributed across the universe? Or are we the result of a sufficiently unusual coincidence of events that when we are (inevitably) gone, so too will life vanish? The book takes us from Aristarchus in ancient Greece, via the search for exoplanets and our realisation that there are some very odd things going on Out There, through to how on Earth we're supposed to answer this question anyway. More importantly, can we answer this question, or are we so caught up in the apparently amazing fact of our own existence that we simply can't find the right questions to ask? Are we too close to the problem?
This is an engaging book that covers a lot of scientific ground, but if you don't like lyricism and whimsical turns of phrase in your science writing then this one might not be for...