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Posted by: AlexBlackwell Dec 27 2005, 05:50 PM

The latest issue of the journal Astrobiology (Volume 5, Number 6, December 2005) is now http://www.liebertonline.com/toc/ast/5/6.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Jan 18 2006, 02:14 AM

For those of you without a subscription, note that the publisher is now offering free online access to the entire issue.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jan 26 2006, 10:11 PM

Ward’s new book Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life ... maintains Ward’s skepticism about finding intelligent aliens.

However, the book builds on the less-noticed flip side of Ward and Brownlee’s “Rare Earth Hypothesis” -- that simple life may be fairly common. In this view, microbial life may evolve rather readily from non-life, and can sustain itself in a wide range of conditions, but only rarely does a planet or moon remain habitable long enough for complex life to develop (and such life is far more fragile than microbes).

Finding extraterrestrial life, for Ward, thus becomes a question of hunting alien microbes, and he regards it as quite plausible that these will be found within our solar system.

Life as We Do Not Know It provides an intriguing discussion of possible varieties of alien organisms, and a world-by-world survey of the prospects for finding them in our own cosmic backyard.

Ward also proposes some changes to standard scientific thinking about how to define and classify life, and he makes a case for sending humans, not just robotic probes, to search for life on other worlds -- in particular Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=012206B