Five Billion Years of Solitude (40 page)

Kevin Starr,
California: A History
(New York: Modern Library, 2005).

Philippe Thébault, Francesco Marzari, and Hans Scholl, “Planet formation in the habitable zone of alpha Centauri B,”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Letters
, vol. 393 (2009), pp. L21–L25.

Various authors,
2063
A.D.
(San Diego: General Dynamics Astronautics, 1963).

Various authors, The Lick Observatory Historical Collections Project, http://collections.ucolick.org/archives_on_line/.

CHAPTER 6: The Big Picture

Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of mankind,”
Nature
, vol. 415 (2002), p. 23.

Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’”
Global Change Newsletter
, vol. 41 (2000), pp. 17–18.

Christian de Duve,
Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative
(New York: Basic Books, 1995).

James Hansen,
Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).

Andrew H. Knoll,
Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

James Lovelock,
The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
(New York: Basic Books, 2009).

Seamus McGraw,
The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone
(New York: Random House, 2011).

John McPhee,
Basin and Range
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981). I quote from McPhee’s embodiment of the geological timescale on page 127, which comes in the midst of a more general discussion of deep time that, in tone and outlook, has greatly influenced by own thoughts on the subject as presented in this book.

Oliver Morton,
Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

Andrew Revkin,
Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1992). Revkin presaged Crutzen and Stoermer’s “Anthropocene” by eight years; he called the dawning geological era the “Anthrocene.”

William F. Ruddiman,
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

J. William Schopf and Cornelis Klein, eds.,
The Proterozoic Biosphere: A Multidisciplinary Study
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Various authors, Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, http://www.marcellus.psu.edu. This website contains a wealth of information about gas-shale fracking in Pennsylvania and includes detailed publication lists and geological maps.

Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
, vol. 369 (2011), pp. 1036–55.

CHAPTER 7: Out of Equilibrium

John A. Baross et al.,
The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems
(Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007). This report is available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11919.

Stephen H. Dole and Isaac Asimov,
Planets for Man
(New York: Random House, 1964). A condensed and popularized version of Dole’s RAND Corporation Research Study,
Habitable Planets for Man
.

L. Kaltenegger, S. Udry, and F. Pepe, “A Habitable Planet around HD 85512?” arXiv preprint (2011).

James Kasting,
How to Find a Habitable Planet
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). I recommend this excellent book to those readers wishing to seek out the scholarly papers mentioned in Chapter 7, as well as any readers wishing for a readable-yet-rigorous take on planetary habitability.

Ravi Kumar Kopparapu et al., “Habitable Zones Around Main-Sequence Stars: New Estimates,” arXiv preprint (2013).

Charles H. Langmuir and Wally Broecker,
How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind
, revised and expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

J. E. Lovelock,
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Stephen H. Schneider and Penelope J. Boston, eds.,
Scientists on Gaia
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

Peter Ward,
The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee,
The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World
(New York: Times Books, 2003).

CHAPTER 8: Aberrations of the Light

Norman R. Augustine et al.,
Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation
(Washington, DC: NASA, 2009). This report is available online at http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/396093main_HSF_Cmte_FinalReport.pdf.

Lee Billings, “The telescope that ate astronomy,”
Nature
, vol. 467 (2010), pp. 1028–30.

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

Kenneth G. Carpenter et al., “OpTIIX: An ISS-based Testbed Paving the Roadmap toward a Next Generation, Large Aperture UV/Optical Space Telescope,” June 20, 2012. uvastro2012.colorado.edu/Presentations/KennethCarpenter.pdf. This material was presented at the “UV Astronomy: HST and Beyond Conference” hosted by the University of Colorado, Boulder, from June 18–21, 2012.

Andrew Chaikin,
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1994).

Daniel S. Goldin, “NASA in the Next Millennium,” January 17, 1996. http://home.fnal.gov/~annis/digirati/otherVoices/goldin.AAS.html. This is the transcript of Goldin’s speech at the 187th American Astronomical Society meeting in San Antonio, Texas, and is the source for Goldin’s quotes in this chapter.

Greg Klerkx,
Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age
(New York: Pantheon, 2004).

John M. Logsdon,
John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Matt Mountain, Untitled Presentation at TEDxMidAtlantic 2010, November 5, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4qO4GjyyUI. This public talk contains many of the same points and visualizations that Mountain employed during our discussions.

Michael J. Neufeld,
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
(New York: Knopf, 2007).

N. A. Rynin, author and editor,
Interplanetary Flight and Communication, Vol. III, No. 7: K. E. Tsiolkovskii: Life, Writings, and Rockets
(Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1971). Rynin originally self-published this volume in Leningrad in 1931. I have drawn Tsiolkovsky’s quotes from pages 3, 7, 30, and 31.

Robert Zimmerman,
The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

CHAPTER 9: The Order of the Null

C. A. Beichman, N. J. Woolf, and C. A. Lindensmith, eds.,
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF): A NASA Origins Program to Search for Habitable Planets
(Pasadena: NASA-Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1999). This report is available online at http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_book/index.cfm.

Michael Belfiore,
Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2007).

Lee Billings, “Let There Be Light,” Seedmagazine.com, November 17, 2009. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/let_there_be_light/.

Roger D. Blandford et al.,
New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics
(Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010). This report is available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12951.

Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom,
Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

Charles Elachi et al.,
A Road Map for the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems
(Pasadena: NASA-Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1996). This report is available online at http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/exnps/toc.html.

James Kasting, Wesley Traub et al.,
Terrestrial Planet Finder—Coronagraph (TPF-C) Flight Baseline Mission Concept
(Pasadena: NASA-Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2009). This report is available online at http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF-C/TPFC-MissionAstro2010RFI-Final-2009-04-01.pdf.

Michael D. Lemonick,
Mirror Earth: The Search for Our Planet’s Twin
(New York: Walker, 2012). In addition to providing a marvelous overview of the history and forefront of planet hunting, Lemonick’s book also offers a detailed independent perspective on the events of Seager’s “The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets” conference.

Jonathan Lunine et al., “Worlds Beyond: A Strategy for the Detection and Characterization of Exoplanets,” Report of the ExoPlanet Task Force, Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (Washington, DC: NSF/NASA, 2008). This report is available online at http://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/aaac/exoplanet_task_force/reports/exoptf_final_report.pdf.

Christopher F. McKee, Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., et al.,
Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium
(Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2001). This report is available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9839.

Sara Seager et al., “The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets,” MIT, May 27, 2011. http://seagerexoplanets.mit.edu/next40years.htm. Program speakers, photographs, and a web archive of the videotaped proceedings are available at this hyperlink.

W. A. Traub and B. R. Oppenheimer, “Direct Imaging of Exoplanets,” in
Exoplanets
, Sara Seager, ed. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

Stephen C. Unwin et al., “Taking the Measure of the Universe: Precision Astrometry with SIM PlanetQuest,”
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
, vol. 120 (2008), pp. 38–88.

CHAPTER 10: Into the Barren Lands

Freeman Dyson,
Disturbing the Universe
(New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

John S. Lewis,
Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets
(New York: Perseus Books, 1996).

Gerard K. O’Neill,
The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space
(New York: William Morrow, 1976).

Carl Sagan,
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
(New York: Random House, 1994). I quote Sagan from pages 6 and 7.

Carl Sagan et al.,
Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record
(New York: Random House, 1978).

Sara Seager, “Sixty Days in the Land of Little Sticks: Part 2: Nowleye and Kamilukuak Rivers, Casimir and Kasba Lakes,”
Nastawgan, the Quarterly Journal of the Wilderness Canoe Association
, vol. 23, no. 3 (1996), pp. 1–7.