Book Review:
The Search for Life on Mars: The Greatest Scientific Detective Story of All Time
By Elizabeth Howell and Nicholas Booth
A riveting chronicle about intriguing personalities and missions involved in the quest for Martian life
Despite being one of the closest planets to Earth, Mars has continued to represent a deep mystery. For more than a century, though luminaries such as Percival Lowell speculated about life on the Red Planet, science has revealed that its conditions are singularly uninviting, including an extremely thin atmosphere, extraordinarily cold temperatures, and so forth. Paradoxically, though, the discovery of microbes on Earth living under incredibly hostile conditions, has increased the odds of such extremophile life being found on other worlds.
In this important and fascinating book, Howell and Booth superbly examine such questions in an episodic fashion, with each chapter focusing on one or more of the missions to probe Martian conditions — or alternatively to simulate what we might see on Mars by exploring extreme parts of Earth, such as Antarctica.
As a historian of science, I particularly enjoyed the section about the eccentric Lowell, who was so convincing that many people thought life on Mars was a given. As the authors point out, a contest run in 1902 to find alien life excluded Mars because it would be “too easy.” Bringing us up to date with current research, another intriguing section concerns the ongoing controversy over potential fossil evidence for biological materials from Mars in a meteorite believed to have come from that planet.
Howell and Booth have a journalists’ flair for elucidating the human side of an extraordinary chronicle that is far from over. In short, The Search for Life on Mars is the quintessential account of one of humanity’s most intriguing quests. (This review was submitted to Amazon.com, with a rating of 5 out of 5 stars).
Paul Halpern is a University of the Sciences physics professor and the author of sixteen popular science books, including Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect.
