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Although you’ve just written a book about alien life, you’ve got three young children. Has that made you reassess life in general?
I think a new baby makes you reassess a lot of things in your life, from home furnishings right on up to the existence of God. But the reason for writing the book – which was started three or four years ago – was to continue from where I left off with my first book, It’s Not Rocket Science.
I found that I was fascinated by biology and the extraordinary advances being made in that area, and I also kept stumbling across different areas where people were talking about alien life and I just thought it would be a great thing to bring all of those things together in one book and talk about the real science of aliens. So my route into The Aliens Are Coming! was sort of through that. It’s why this book starts where the last one leaves off, because I ended the first with a discussion of extraterrestrial life.
You say in your book that, as a boy in the 1970s, the hopes of finding life kept diminishing the more space was being explored. Was that disappointing for you?
It was a really depressing time. It was beautifully summed up by [late astronomer] Carl Sagan in his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision Of The Human Future In Space, in 1994: “The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.” The 1970s was a golden age for robotic missions and that was an extraordinary period: we sent stuff to Venus and all the way out of the Solar System. Amazing. But then things just slid. We’re actually now entering a golden age for telescopes and I think it’s amazing what our telescopes can do now; just incredible.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 144 من All About Space UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 144 من All About Space UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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LONG AGO, A LAKE ON MARS MAY HAVE BEEN SPRAWLING WITH MICROBES
Curiosity discovered manganese oxide in bedrock in a Martian region that may have been a shoreline billions of years ago
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MOON TOUR HELL
Finding this fascinating crater isnt as hard as its name suggests...
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THIS MONTH'S PLANETS
Most of the planets are tricky targets this month, but our guide will help you locate them
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UNIVERSE BEFORE TIME
Could the existence of a mirror-image cosmos before the Big Bang solve some of the biggest mysteries in astronomy?
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CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Alongside Earth, our planetary neighbourhood is changing, but it’s not for the better…
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Stars give tiny planets a gravitational 'squeeze' to strip away their atmospheres
A scientist has learned more about the violent processes that rip atmospheres away from planets, finding that squashing and squeezing by a parent star can contribute to this process.
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The Milky Way's halo is filled with ‘magnetic doughnuts' as wide as 100,000 light years
The outer halo of the Milky Way is filled with magnetic fields that take the shape of vast doughnuts with diameters ranging from 12,000 to 100,000 light years, with the heart of our galaxy at their centre.
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The Pentagon wants the commercial space reserve to support military satellites in orbit
The US Department of Defense is developing a plan to use the ever-growing American commercial space industry for national security purposes.
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DOES A COSMIC 'GLITCH' IN GRAVITY CHALLENGE ALBERT EINSTEIN'S GREATEST THEORY?
Gravity changes once you reach a cosmic scale
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DEEP SKY CHALLENGE : STELLAR TREASURES OF THE ARCHER AND SCORPION
Summer skies are stuffed full of amazing objects for your telescope - if you're prepared to stay up late