Five Billion Years of Solitude (39 page)

CHAPTER 1: Looking for Longevity

Ronald N. Bracewell,
The Galactic Club: Intelligent Life in Outer Space
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1974).

Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,”
Nature,
vol. 184 (1959), pp. 844–46.

Frank Drake and Dava Sobel,
Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1992). I quote Drake from page 27.

Stanislaw Lem,
Summa Technologiae
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; first edition, 1964). Translated by Joanna Zylinska, this is the first complete English translation of Lem’s prescient classic on cosmic evolution.

J. P. T. Pearman, “Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life and Interstellar Communication: An Informal Discussion,” in
Interstellar Communication
, A. G. W. Cameron, ed. (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1963), pp. 287–93.

Iosif Shklovskii and Carl Sagan,
Intelligent Life in the Universe
(San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966).

Walter Sullivan,
We Are Not Alone: The Continuing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1993).

Otto Struve, “Proposal for a Project of High-Precision Stellar Radial Velocity Work,”
The Observatory
, vol. 72 (1952), pp. 199–200.

CHAPTER 2: Drake’s Orchids

J. D. Bernal,
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1929).

Paul Davies,
The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

Frank Drake, “Stars as Gravitational Lenses,” in
Bioastronomy—The Next Steps
, G. Marx, ed., Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol. 144 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), pp. 391–94.

Frank Drake and Dava Sobel,
Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1992). Drake’s calculation of how many boxes of corn flakes the Arecibo Observatory radio dish could hold appears on pages 73–74.

Von R. Eshleman, “Gravitational Lens of the Sun: Its Potential for Observations and Communications Over Interstellar Distances,”
Science
, vol. 205 (1979), pp. 1133–35.

Paul Gilster,
Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
(New York: Springer, 2004).

Hans Moravec,
Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee,
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe
(New York: Springer, 2000).

CHAPTER 3: A Fractured Empire

Guillem Anglada-Escudé et al., “A Planetary System around the Nearby M Dwarf GJ 667C with At Least One Super-Earth in its Habitable Zone,”
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
, vol. 751 (2012), pp. L16–.

Lee Billings, “G is for Goldilocks,” Seedmagazine.com, October 1, 2010. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/g_is_for_goldilocks/.

Xavier Bonfils et al., “The HARPS Search for Southern Extra-solar Planets XXXI. The M-dwarf Sample,”
Astronomy & Astrophysics
, vol. 549 (2013), pp. 109–.

Alan Boss,
The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets
(New York: Basic Books, 2009).

Xavier Delfosse et al., “The HARPS Search for Southern Extra-solar Planets XXXV. Super-Earths around the M-dwarf Neighbors Gl433 and Gl667C,” arXiv preprint (2012).

Bruce Dorminey,
Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System
(New York: Springer, 2001).

Thierry Forveille et al., “The HARPS Search for Southern Extra-solar Planets XXXII. Only 4 planets in the Gl~581 system,” arXiv preprint (2011).

Philip C. Gregory, “Bayesian Re-analysis of the Gliese 581 Exoplanet System,” arXiv e-print (2011).

Ray Jayawardhana,
Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

Marc Kaufman,
First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Michael D. Lemonick,
Other Worlds: The Search for Life in the Universe
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Tim Stephens, “Newly discovered planet may be first truly habitable exoplanet,” University of California, Santa Cruz, Newscenter, September 29, 2010. http://news.ucsc.edu/2010/09/planet.html.

Otto Struve, “Astronomers in Turmoil,”
Physics Today
, vol. 13 (1960), p. 18.

Mikko Tuomi, “Bayesian Re-analysis of the Radial Velocities of Gliese 581. Evidence in Favour of Only Four Planetary Companions,” arXiv preprint (2011).

Steven S. Vogt et al., “The Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey: A 3.1 M_Earth Planet in the Habitable Zone of the Nearby M3V Star Gliese 581,”
The Astrophysical Journal
, vol. 723 (2010), pp. 954–65.

Steven S. Vogt, R. Paul Butler, and Nader Haghighipour, “GJ 581 Update: Additional Evidence for a Super-Earth in the Habitable Zone,”
Astronomische Nachrichten
, vol. 333 (2012), pp. 561–75.

CHAPTER 4: The Worth of a World

Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin,
The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity
(New York: Free Press, 1999).

John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler,
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Marcia Bartusiak,
The Day We Found the Universe
(New York: Pantheon, 2009).

Lee Billings, “Cosmic Commodities: How much is a new planet worth?” Boingboing.net, February 3, 2011. http://boingboing.net/2011/02/03/cosmic-commodities-h.html.

Bill Bryson,
A Short History of Nearly Everything
(New York: Broadway Books, 2003).

Thane Burnett, “Wanna buy the Earth? It’ll cost you $5 quadrillion,”
Toronto Sun
, March 1, 2011. http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/thane_burnett/2011/03/01/17455846.html.

Robert Costanza et al., “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital,”
Nature
, vol. 387 (1997), pp. 253–60.

Michael J. Crowe, ed.,
The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).Daily Mail Reporter, “Earth is worth £3,000 trillion, according to scientist’s new planet valuing formula,” MailOnline.com, February 28, 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1361145/Earth-worth-3-000-trillion-according-scientists-new-planet-valuing-formula.html.

Steven J. Dick,
The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Stephen Greenblatt,
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

Alan H. Guth,
The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins
(New York: Perseus Books, 1997).

Arthur Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe
(New York: Macmillan, 1959).

D. G. Korycansky, Gregory Laughlin, and Fred C. Adams, “Astronomical engineering: a strategy for modifying planetary orbits,”
Astrophysics and Space Science
, vol. 275 (2001), pp. 349–66.

Greg Laughlin, “Too cheap to meter,”
systemic
, March 12, 2009. http://oklo.org/2009/03/12/too-cheap-to-meter/.

Lucretius,
On the Nature of Things
(Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2003). I quote from pages 59 and 60 of Walter Englert’s excellent translation.

Carl Sagan,
Cosmos
(New York: Random House, 1980).

Alex Vilenkin,
Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

CHAPTER 5: After the Gold Rush

Lee Billings, “The Long Shot,” Seedmagazine.com, May 19, 2009. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_long_shot/.

Ray Bradbury,
The Martian Chronicles
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950). Laughlin’s quote comes from “The Naming of Names” section of Bradbury’s classic, p. 136.

Xavier Dumusque et al., “An Earth-mass planet orbiting α Centauri B,”
Nature
, vol. 491 (2012), pp. 207–11.

Freeman John Dyson, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,”
Science
, vol. 131 (1960), pp. 1667–68.

Paul Gilster, “New Search for Centauri Planets Begins,”
Centauri Dreams
, December 2, 2009. http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10489.

Javiera Guedes et al., “Formation and Detectability of Terrestrial Planets Around Alpha Centauri B,”
The Astrophysical Journal
, vol. 679 (2008), pp. 1582–87.

Edward Singleton Holden,
A Brief Account of the Lick Observatory of the University of California (1895)
(Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010).

Andrew W. Howard et al., “The Occurrence and Mass Distribution of Close-in Super-Earths, Neptunes, and Jupiters,”
Science
, vol. 330 (2010), pp. 653–55.

Andrew W. Howard et al., “Planet Occurrence within 0.25 AU of Solar-type Stars from Kepler,”
The Astrophysical Journal: Supplement Series
, vol. 201, no. 2 (2012).

John McPhee,
Assembling California
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993).

Isaac William Martin,
The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

Tom Murphy, “Galactic-Scale Energy,”
Do the Math
, July 12, 2011. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/.