At this point, I’ll read anything written by Carl Sagan. He’s an amazing storyteller with a rare gift for explaining complex ideas without ever talking down to his audience. In other words, he doesn’t make his readers feel like complete idiots. Originally published in 1995, The Demon-Haunted World may show its age in a few examples, but its message is as relevant — if not more so — today as it was nearly thirty years ago.
This book does a great job taking a lot of information we know about life and considering where we might be able to find it – not only within our solar system, but in the cosmos. Not only that, the author thinks about both life as we know it and life as we don’t know it.
I debated about whether or not to write a review since I didn’t finish this book (I did read half the book). But I thought it be prudent for the casual reader to know my impressions of it before they pick it up. In short, it was quite interesting, but a little too academic for my casual interest.
This book effectively picks up where Liftoff left off. Plus, it covers Elon Musk’s, how to put this, mental decline over the last several years. But ultimately what this book does is tells the story of the hard work that a lot of people put in to make a private company successful and the future of human spaceflight a little brighter.
Say what you will about Elon Musk… go ahead, I’ll wait… you get it out of your system? Okay, so putting all that aside, if you ever thought your job was hard, imagine working for a huge nerd with a lofty vision and seemingly endless amounts of money who just wants to get. things. done. That was the early days of SpaceX.
“You know, I can understand nine words in that book now.” – Billy Madison
I’m sure for a lot people, they don’t have that “I remember where I was when we saw the first images of Pluto.” But I do. I was at work, watching a live NASA feed as they released the first high resolution images of that most distant planet, er, dwarf planet, Pluto.
Another pick for the Planetary Society book club. And what an amazing pick this was! Who knew that a journey to a lifeless rock somewhere between Mars and Jupiter would be interesting?! This author understood the assignment!
I should preface this by mentioning that I realize this is a bit of a controversial book. And the show that it inspired, Ancient Aliens, may be even more controversial in its claims. But who doesn’t like a good ol’ conspiracy theory or “out there” claims? I, for one, love hearing flat-earthers try to back their claims. But let me be clear – this book only asks questions and puts forward hypotheses as to possible answers. And the author even acknowledges how crazy these may sound.
Would you like to go to Mars? I know I would. But would you want to immigrate there? If so, this book is chock-full of information on how to get there, how to live there, how to work there, how to start slavery there, how our world kind of sucks, how America started but isn’t going so well, and how to get around on our neighbor, the Red Planet.
