Insightful, good-humored essays on the possibilities of alien life and the uses of space exploration, based on an astrobiologist's everyday conversations with his fellow humans--taxi drivers, to be precise.

If you've ever sat in the back seat of a taxi, you know that cabbies like to talk. Sports or politics, your job or theirs, taxi drivers are fine conversationalists on just about any topic. And when the passenger is astrobiologist Charles Cockell, that topic is usually space and what, if anything, lives out there.

Inspired by conversations with drivers all over the world, Taxi from Another Planet tackles the questions that everyday people have about the cosmos and our place in it. Will we understand aliens? What if there isn't life out in the universe? Is Mars our Plan B? And why is the government spending tax dollars on space programs anyway? Each essay in this genial collection takes questions like these as a starting point on the way to a range of insightful, even poignant, observations. Cockell delves into debates over the inevitability of life and looks to both human history and scientific knowledge to consider what first contact will be like and what we can expect from spacefaring societies. He also offers a forceful argument for the sympathies between space exploration and environmentalism.

A shrewd and entertaining foray into the most fundamental mysteries, Taxi from Another Planet brings together the wisdom of scientific experts and their fellow citizens of Earth, the better to understand how life might unfold elsewhere.

Author: Charles S. Cockell
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 08/30/2022
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.29h x 5.92w x 1.08d
ISBN: 9780674271838


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/09/2022
Library Journal 06/01/2022 pg. 168