The Cosmic Zoo (eBook)

Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a professor at the Technical University Berlin, Germany and an adjunct professor at Arizona State University and Washington State University. A geoscientist turned microbiologist and astrobiologist he has researched how life interacts with its natural environment for over 25 years. He is interested in all aspects of astrobiology, but particularly whether other planets and moons inside and outside of our Solar System could serve as a potential habitat for life. Dirk Schulze-Makuch is best known for his publications on extraterrestrial life, which span nearly 200 scientific articles and several books such as Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints (2004, 2008), A One Way Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet (2011), and Cosmic Biology: How Life could Evolve on Other Worlds (2011). In 2012 and 2017 he also published with David Darling Megacatastrophes! Nine Strange Ways the World Could End and The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia, respectively. William Bains is a researcher at MIT in Cambridge, MA, and lecturer at the University of Warwick and elsewhere in the UK. Originally trained as a biochemist, he has spent most of his career in the biotechnology industry, where his research focused on how the chemistry of life works, and how it fails. He has founded five biotechnology companies, and helped create many others, three of which are currently listed on the London Stock Exchange. His astrobiological research for over 15 years has focused on the chemistry of life, how it might vary on other worlds, and how we might detect life there. William has written four previous books and over 100 research papers on topics as diverse as drug chemistry, company law and finance, and evolutionary theory, as well as the search for life – simple and complex – on other worlds.

Preface.- Introduction.- Part I – The Cosmic Zoo Hypothesis.- The Cosmic Zoo Hypothesis.- The Evolutionary Tool Set.- Pre-Conditions for Complex Life.- Part II – Major Transitions in Earth’s Life History.- The first Cell and The Origin of Life Challenge.- Using Light: The Invention of Photosynthesis.- Oxygen: from Poison to Photosystem II.- Endosymbiosis and the first Eukaryotes.- Sex: a New Way of Reproduction.- The First Multicellular Organisms.- The Rise of Large, Complex Organisms.- Intelligence, a New Concept?.- Technologically Advanced Intelligence: Are there Visitors in the Cosmic Zoo?.- Part III The Great Filter and the Fermi Paradox.