Phil Plait (W. W. Norton & Company)
YOU may know him from his Bad Astronomy blog, which demolishes misconceptions and fraudulent claims about the cosmos. Now, in Under Alien Skies: A sightseer鈥檚 guide to the universe, the tireless Phil Plait is taking us on the most spectacular journey. We sail past our satellite moon, past Mars, Saturn and Pluto on to other stars, binaries and clusters, to nebulae and to the end of all things, as he sends us spiralling beyond the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole.
With a few exceptions for the most exotic cosmic objects, the book sets out to describe only what poor, inadequate humanity is equipped by nature to experience. This is the cosmos as we would feel, hear and see it in person. Some measure of security and comfort is provided by the starships of ever-increasing unlikelihood that Plait conjures, but, deep down, we are on our own out here, trembling at the magnificence of it all.
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This artful premise gives Plait licence to discuss what our real future in the solar system might look like, while he also explores some startling stellar exotica.
Plait鈥檚 evocations of our own solar system are superbly sensual. But in the book鈥檚 final chapters, on star clusters, nebulae and black holes, our suspension of disbelief starts to come unstuck. This is partly to do with the fact there is nothing for us to smell, hear, walk on or trip over.
Sooner or later, we will be overwhelmed by a galaxy, such as Andromeda, that is a lot bigger than we are. Here, Plait describes our likely response as we witness the birth of stars: 鈥淵our mind tries to comprehend what you鈥檙e seeing, churning out analogies rapid-fire 鈥� it鈥檚 like an explosion in a radioactive cotton candy factory, like being suspended in a frozen fireworks display鈥� but in the end you fail. Humans never evolved to comprehend magnificence on a scale like this.鈥�
Some of the grandest wonders in his arsenal are simply invisible to the naked eye. So, now and again, the captain of our imaginary starship tweaks the viewscreens, showing us things we wouldn鈥檛 have seen by leaning out of the window. On those rare occasions, we passengers may wonder: what are we doing here? Why come this far to watch a video of sorts? Surely the same 惫茅谤颈迟茅 could have been achieved in front of a 5K screen in our pyjamas?
You could argue Plait should have stuck to his guns and, even in the chapter on black holes, described only what humans would see with their own eyes. But this is a game we abandoned centuries ago. Our machines have better access to the world than we do, and this has been true at least since Dutch lens grinders invented the telescope.
Much more telling is this: virtually every wonder in this book is to do with scale. Bigger, brighter, heavier things dominate this account. But where are the stranger things? Is there anything in this book as abidingly weird as, oh, I don鈥檛 know, a tree? A cat? Fish and chips?
Earth beats the rest of the known cosmos hands down for complexity and change. And, yes, there may well be other biomes out there, but Plait can鈥檛 just invent them out of whole cloth. That would be fantasy, and this is a book rooted, however speculatively, in the known.
Plait is a skilled, resourceful and, on occasion, downright visionary guide to the far reaches of outer space. If this book leaves a few readers feeling very slightly disappointed, it won鈥檛 be Plait who has fallen short, but the cosmos. For 300 thrilling pages, short-lived, fragile and under-equipped readers have relied on imaginary technology to get them places that they don鈥檛 belong. It is no bad thing if this exhilarating book engenders a renewed feeling of reverence for their own world.
Simon Ings is a writer and critic聽based聽in London
