One of Ten Billion Earths

How We Learn About Our Planet's past and Future from Distant Exoplanets

De: Karel Schrijver

Narrado por: Steve Menasche

This audiobook explores how the discoveries within the Solar System and of exoplanets far beyond it come together to help us understand the habitability of Earth, and how these findings guide the search for exoplanets that could support life. The author highlights how, within two decades of the discovery of the first planets outside the Solar System in the 1990s, scientists concluded that planets are so common that most stars are orbited by them.

The lives of exoplanets and their stars are inextricably interwoven. Stars are the seeds around which planets form, and they provide light and warmth for as long as they shine. At the end of their lives, stars expel massive amounts of newly forged elements into deep space, and that ejected material is incorporated into subsequent generations of planets.

How do we learn about these distant worlds? What does the exploration of other planets tell us about Earth? Can we find out what the distant future may have in store for us? What do we know about exoworlds and starbirth, and where do migrating hot Jupiters, polluted white dwarfs, and free-roaming nomad planets fit in? And what does all that have to do with the habitability of Earth, the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life, and the operation of the globe-spanning network of the sciences?

©2018 Karel Schrijver (P)2018 Tantor

Fascinating book !

I really enjoyed listening to this book. I have been a space junkie from childhood, even though I work in totally different area. Exoplanets are relatively new field, and I learned a lot.

Amazon book, horrible narrator.

This guy sounds like he’s got his head in a fish bowl and is 5 steps away from dropping the lollipop out of his mouth. Every sentence ends or continues after a comma as if he’s mega confused. He sounds like one of those high school girls who makes everything she says, sound like she’s asking a question. I can’t tell if he has a lollipop or a dip in his mouth. Whoever picked this guy to do this has no idea what they are doing and whoever recorded him, has no idea about acoustics or sound proofing.