'Light Of The Stars' Looks To Other Planets To Illuminate Climate Change On Earth
Adam Frank's valuable new book looks at the history of our search for other planets — and uses lessons drawn from outer space to shed light on the effect humans are having on our own planet.
In 1960, a graduate student at Yerkes Observatory named Carl Sagan had a problem: The temperature on the planet Venus was too high. For decades, scientists had thought that Venus was covered in clouds because it was a watery world, possibly teeming with life, a slightly hotter version of Earth. Venus is nearly the same size as Earth, and a bit closer to the Sun, so it seemed reasonable to think it was just a somewhat balmier version of our own world. But in 1956, a team of astronomers
