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Imagined life : a speculative scientific journey among the exoplanets in search of intelligent aliens, ice creatures, and supergravity animals / James Trefil, Michael Summers.

by Trefil, James S, 1938-

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Smithsonian Books, 2019.

Life on other planets.

Extraterrestrial beings.

Extrasolar planets.

Habitable planets.

9781588346643 (hc.)

232 p., 8 unnumbered pages of plates : col. ill.; 24 cm.

Includes index.

The unexpected galaxy -- Opportunities and constraints: a universe of laws -- Life: what is it? -- The rules of the game: how every living system has to work -- Looking for life: is it really out there? -- Iceheim: life in the deep freeze -- Nova Europa: the ocean beneath the ice -- Neptunia: water, water everywhere -- Goldilocks world: just like us -- Halo: life at the terminator -- Lonesome: all by itself -- Big boy: the heavy one -- Trappist-I: a crowded system -- A closer look: it gets even stranger -- Life that is not like us: what if we're not the only kind? -- Life that is really not like us: it can get pretty weird -- Open questions.

"It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring readers on a marvelous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life--unlike anything we have experienced so far--that could exist on planets outside our own solar system. Life could be out there in many forms: on frozen worlds, living in liquid oceans beneath ice and communicating (and even battling) with bubbles; on super-dense planets, where they would have evolved body types capable of dealing with extreme gravity; on tidally locked planets with one side turned eternally toward a star; and even on "rogue worlds," which have no star at all. Yet this is no fictional flight of fancy: the authors take what we know about exoplanets and life on our own world and use that data to hypothesize about how, where, and which sorts of life might develop. Imagined Life is a must-have for anyone wanting to learn how the realities of our universe may turn out to be far stranger than fiction."

Summers, Michael E.

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