Here Be Dragons: The Scientific Quest for Extraterrestrial Life

"Experts in many diverse disciplines have come together to form a new science: astrobiology," report astronomer David Koerner and biologist-writer Simon LeVay.

It is a fundamentally new enterprise, a focus of intense excitement and energy, and a recipient of huge government resources. This science has just one ambition: To understand Life in its universal context and, in doing so, to understand ourselves.

Koerner and LeVay have no particular thesis to advance about astrobiology and extraterrestrial life, no axe to grind: they have talked to everybody from Stephen Jay Gould and Robert Weinberg to the (human) denizens of Area 51. Their evenhanded overview moves from the origin of life on Earth to the search for life in our solar system to the search for planets around other stars to SETI, UFO-logy, and the anthropic principle. Since each of these topics can easily take up a whole book (or a shelf-full), theirs is something of a roller-skate tour, but one that misses no major issues. Balanced between the Copernican "principle of mediocrity" and the rare earth hypothesis of Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Here Be Dragons is an accessible, engaging guide to a deeply stirring question: "Is there anybody out there?" --Mary Ellen Curtin