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21 January 2012 | NewScientist | 47

Look to the future25 Things You Need to Know About the Future by Christopher Barnatt, Constable, £8.99

Reviewed by Jamie Condliffe

FUTURE-GAZING is a risky business. Cautious predictions may often come true, but a futurist stating the obvious lacks punch. On the flip side, bold

forecasts may generate more buzz, but they are likely to go the same way as the predictions of flying cars and the household robots we are still waiting for.

Fortunately, in 25 Things You Need to Know About the Future, Christopher Barnatt treads a fine line between these two extremes with skill and balance. All the known quantities are here: from the realities of peak oil, to the burgeoning fields of synthetic biology and ubiquitous computing. But he is also unafraid of exploring ideas that may yet

flop, including tantalising technologies such as space elevators and bioprinting.

Perhaps most importantly, Barnatt also carefully considers the ethical issues we will face. Most notably in the final section he focuses not on the way advancing technology will impact how we will live in the future, but rather how it will change what we

ourselves will become. That’s not to say that the tone is downbeat: in fact, Barnatt remains optimistic throughout.

Admittedly, with many of the ideas which Barnatt presents drawing on current, cutting-edge research, regular readers of New Scientist’s news pages will find few of his predictions surprising. But the neat way in which he ties together the key themes worth worrying about over the next few decades makes this a worthwhile read for anyone curious to know what may await us. n

“Barnatt is unafraid of exploring ideas that may yet flop, including space elevators and bioprinting”

The big questionFind exoplanets and synthetic life and we find ourselves, learns Marcus Chown

The Life of Super-Earths: How the hunt for alien worlds and artificial cells will revolutionize life on our planet by Dimitar Sasselov, Basic Books, £17.99/$25.99

WE CAN kid ourselves about big questions. What is the origin of mass? What is dark matter? Does time really exist? But in our heart of hearts

there is only one question we desperately want to answer: what is life and how did it come about?

Astrophysicist Dimitar Sasselov argues that we are on the brink of being able to answer this question, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Sasselov cites two key developments. The first will come as no surprise: the discovery of planets outside our solar system. The total stands at over 700, with new ones being discovered every day. Rarely in the history of science can a field have advanced at such a breakneck pace.

Of crucial importance to the life

question, which explains Sasselov’s title, is a certain type of extrasolar planet, a super-Earth. These are solid planets of rock and ice between 1 and 10 times the mass of the Earth. We never suspected they existed because, in our own solar system, with its rocky terrestrial planets and bloated gas giants, such bodies are conspicuous by their absence.

It is these super-Earths that are key, argues Sasselov. They are even more attractive as life-

bearing worlds than our home planet. They have a relatively small surface area to volume ratio, for instance, so they are better at holding on to their internal heat than Earth. That makes them likely to have the plate tectonics necessary to prevent carbon dioxide from volcanoes building up to dangerous, Venusian levels. If born with sufficient ice, super-Earths may even have giant oceans spanning the surface, 10 times deeper than any ocean on Earth. Think of those as habitats.

But most importantly, according to Sasselov, the surfaces of super-Earths will be at temperatures that permit large molecules to survive over long

periods of time and attain the concentrations necessary for the chemistry of life.

What chemistry? Ah, this is where the second development crucial to the life question comes in: synthetic life. More specifically, the creation of a chemical system enclosed in a “vesicle” and capable of life’s main functions. According to Sasselov, this field will enable us to overcome our most crippling handicap: that we know of only a single instance of life. It will enable us to explore the limits of biology, to extrapolate from the specific to the general. And here Sasselov sees the two developments feeding off each other. Super-Earths will tell us about the chemical environments for alien life, which will help those seeking synthetic life to zero in on other biochemistries.

And the results of all this striving? To know ourselves, of course. Only by knowing what is possible, says Sasselov in this inspirational book, can we ever understand how life got going on Earth and why it has the characteristics it has. Sasselov quotes T. S. Eliot: “We must never cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” n

Marcus Chown is the author of Solar System for iPad

What might life look like on other worlds?

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