The book "The Search for Life in the Universe"
In the last decade, the problem of searching for life in the universe has attracted more and more attention from specialists of various profiles. The scientific foundations of the approach to solving this problem were laid at the international conference in Byurakan (1971), a seminar on the problem of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations (SETI), held at the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1975), and finally at the international symposium in Tallinn (1981). Materials of the Byurakan Conference and The seminar has already been published, the materials of the Tallinn Symposium should be published this year. However, the small circulation of these collections and the highly professional level of scientific articles make them inaccessible to a wide range of readers. Therefore, the publication of a good popular scientific book devoted to the fascinating problem of the search for life in the universe seems extremely relevant.
In 1983, Mir Publishing House published a beautifully designed book by famous American scientists D. Goldsmith and T. Owen "The Search for Life in the Universe" (translated from the English by V. D. Novikov, edited by Prof. M. Ya. Marov). The authors of the book have set themselves a very difficult task: to present in a popular scientific form the widest range of issues that make up the essence of the problem of the search for life. Let's name just a few of them. How and where can we hope to find life in the universe? How did life on Earth happen? How many civilizations are there in the Galaxy? At what level of development are they?
The authors of the book believe that its main purpose is "to serve as a textbook for... astronomy course, the program of which includes the question of the search for extraterrestrial life."
It seems to me that the book is written too popularly for its main purpose, in particular, it does not use the mathematical apparatus at all (and some issues related, by the way, directly to astronomy are set out too simplistically for a textbook). But, of course, the book by D. Goldsmith and T. Owen is good primarily for the breadth of coverage of the material, a lively and accessible presentation. This makes it interesting for a schoolboy, a student, and a professional researcher.
There are five parts in the book "The Search for Life in the Universe", and only the last one directly concerns the issue of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence and estimating the number of possible civilizations in our Galaxy. And although one of the parts of the book is called "The Search for Life in the Solar System", from it the reader learns mainly about the origin of the Solar System, the initial stages of its evolution, the characteristics of the planets, the latest achievements of space research.
This part also analyzes the results of experiments on the search for life on Mars. The rest of the volume of the book (more than half) It is devoted to questions of the history of the universe and the problem of the origin of life. This approach to the construction of a popular science book seems to me legitimate. Touching upon a wide range of issues in varying degrees of completeness, the authors undoubtedly made the book much more fascinating than if, for example, they had followed the path of a detailed analysis of technical solutions of receiving and transmitting systems for communication with extraterrestrial civilizations.
Of course, the attempt to give a detailed panoramic overview of various fields of science has a downside. So, in my opinion, the part of the book devoted to the origin of life is written superficially. The authors failed to reflect the importance and complexity of the most interesting aspect of the problem — the origin and evolution of the genetic code.
The undoubted advantages of the book include a principled and objective analysis of the UFO issue. The critical remarks made in the book about von Deniken's "works" and the corresponding assessments of his "creativity" are extremely useful.
A successful attempt has already been made in the world popular science literature to tell about life and its place in the world around us - I mean the excellent book by I. S. Shklovsky "The Universe, Life, Mind". D. Goldsmith and T. Owen pay tribute to it. But the problem of life in the universe is so multifaceted and intriguing that the translation into Russian of another interesting book can only be welcomed. I would like to note again the excellent design of the book "The Search for Life in the Universe" and the careful work of the editor M. Ya. Marov. It's just a pity that the circulation of this book (16,000 copies) will not satisfy the demand of the Soviet reader. 1win site
