LIGHT OF THE STARS

Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

By Adam Frank

262 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

Near the beginning of his engaging and accessible book “Light of the Stars,” Adam Frank strikes a familiar environmental alarm bell: “It’s like we’ve been given the keys to the planet. Now we’re ready to drive it off a cliff.” Frank’s interesting new idea is to combine a history of climate change on Earth with recent astronomical data indicating the likelihood of a vast number of habitable planets in the universe, to suggest that we can strengthen our resolve to kick our bad environmental habits by viewing our terrestrial civilization from a cosmic perspective. For example, he cites evidence that Mars once had liquid water and a thick atmosphere — friendly conditions for life. Apparently, climates can drastically change over time.

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An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and a founder of the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, Frank argues that we earthlings should adopt a new narrative of our history and future. Rather than just continuing to procreate and exploit our capacities and resources on Earth, we should recognize that we and our planet are evolving together. Our planet might be viewed as a single living organism, coined Gaia by the scientist and futurist James Lovelock. We have entered a new geological age, what biologists call the Anthropocene, in which we, Homo sapiens, are altering the planet, and our survival depends on understanding this symbiosis. Frank asks: Have other civilizations elsewhere in the universe, evolving through their corresponding Anthropocenes, managed to survive? And by what strategy? Of course, we don’t know the answer to these questions, as we have not yet seen evidence of such civilizations beyond our own planet, and we may well not anytime soon. (“Soon,” here, is measured in tens of thousands of years.)