Amazon.co.uk Review
"We will," the authors promise, "make sure that you find more than dust to drink here, because one cannot ... recognise the significance of a scientific truth without the context provided by a story." And the story is a remarkable and frightening one. Mars may have been much more alive than we previously thought; and the extinction of life on that planet has dreadful lessons for us as we load our oceans with carbon dioxide and deplete our atmosphere of free oxygen.
This is ecological siren sounding on a cosmological scale, pitched at the non-scientist. The tricksy, first-person narrative style irritates at times, and the authors' rather naïve model of what we can reasonably expect of science is risible. Once, the authors contend: "Science wasn't a detached professional pursuit. It wasn't just about technology or specialisation. It was about question ... The domain of science was populated by gifted, driven amateurs who found the inquiry into the nature of the universe as compelling as life itself." (Not true: science has always been a trade much like any other, as Lisa Jardine's recent Ingenious Pursuits has so well demonstrated.) But if, less controversially, it is a writer's job to enquire about the world, then Brandenburg and Paxson have a considerable success on their hands: a timely and very frightening book, but one so engaging, it is more likely to inspire us to help save the planet than sink us--as more sober works too often do--into a cynical and useless despair. --Simon Ings
Synopsis
In this account, the authors reveal the deadly connection between Mars and Earth and the devastating impact this could have on the world in which we live. They explain what can and must be done can be done if Earth is to survive at all.
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