Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor in the Astronomy Department and Associate Dean in the College of Science at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He has written popular articles on astronomy and is the author of a number of popular science books. The Living Cosmos is a tour of the search for life in the universe, and the pair of books How It Ends and How It Began cover the origin and fate of everything in the universe. Talking About Life is a series of conversations with pioneers in astrobiology. With Holly Henry, he wrote about the scientific and cultural impact of a dozen iconic NASA missions, Dreams of Other Worlds. A book about his experiences teaching cosmology to Tibetan monks, Humble Before the Void was published in 2014, and his book about the future of humans in space, called Beyond, was published in 2015. His first novel is called Shadow World.
Description: Although we may try to keep it tucked at the back of our minds, most of us are aware of our own mortality. But few among us know what science, with the help of insights yielded from groundbreaking new research, has to say about death on a larger scale. Enter astronomer Chris Impey, who chronicles the death of the whole shebang: individual, species, biosphere, earth, sun, Milky Way, and, finally, the entire universe.
With a healthy dose of humor, How It Ends illuminates everything from the technologies of human life extension and the evolutionary arms race between microbes and men to the inescapable dimming of the sun and the ultimate 鈥渂ig rip,鈥� giving us a rare glimpse into a universe without us.
No death bed conversion for Carl Sagan as he lay dying from Leukemia"
The stage of life is set (Preparation time: ~ 13.8 billion years). We have the right atmosphere, the right forces, the right star, the right planets and the right ingredients of life. Enter modern human (approximately 100,000 years old). Drenched in arrogance, the human begins:
How will I end? Let me count the ways
An accident or the clutches of a disease Senescence or murder Global warming or biological terrorism Gamma rays or asteroid impact Death of the sun or by merging with the neighboring galaxy Oh! Never mind! There are too many ways.
EXIT
A very clever book! If you open up a chapter at random from the middle of the book and then zoom in (i.e. go back) you will eventually land into your own personal death, if you zoom out (i.e. go ahead) you will witness things larger than life, time and space 鈥� the Universe!
I cannot say whether we are a cosmic failure or a cosmic success. I am not even sure whether the idea of being alone in time and space is exciting or depressing. I am not sure about anything. Science can stir something deep inside too, you know!
Ninety pages in, and I'm already experiencing information overload. There are lots of familiar facts that I've forgotten, plus lots of new and fascinating facts. This is a broad-spectrum book that surveys multiple scientific disciplines as well as current social issues.
I hope that I can retain a small fraction of what I'm learning!
Follow up:
Okay, finished! This is a very witty and entertaining book. It's popular science, so the science is not too overwhelming (although I must admit, there were 2 or 3 graphs that I could not comprehend). If you are a scientist, maybe you are already familiar with most of the ground that Impey covers. Especially if you are a scientist who talks with scientists from outside your discipline, and keeps up, generally, with developments in fields other than your own.
What astonishes me is that humans can be so keenly interested in time and space so remote that we as individuals will never experience it. I'm sure that some people would be tempted to brush off such grandiose thinking as impertinent to their lives and personal concerns. While I get that, there's still something intoxicating about contemplating our small place in the grand scheme of things. It's ennobling to realize that we, as a species, value contemplation for its own sake; and that we are willing, as a society, to pay people like Impey to devote their lives to deep speculation about the ultimate fate of the universe and of our species.
There's enough speculation here to fuel several science fiction novels. This book bursts at the seams with facts, so I'm tempted to re-read it soon because I simply cannot hold it all in my puny, mediocre brain.
Here's a characteristic passage, just so you get a feel for this book:
"Shrink the universe by a factor of 300 million. Earth reduces to the size of a golf ball, fitting comfortably in your hand. The Sun becomes a glowing three-meter ball 400 meters away and the Solar System is the size of a small town. but the nearest star in this model is 35,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) away so most of the universe is still beyond view. Now shrink by a second factor of 300 million. The stars reduce to microscopic scales and the typical distance between stellar systems is three millimeters. The Milky Way is a twisting spiral about 300 meters across and the nearest comparable galaxies are about a kilometer distant. Even with a factor of 10 (to the 17th)reduction in scale, the most distant galaxies are 45,000 kilometers (30,000 miles) away."
This is a book about death. It starts with your death. Then, it goes on to the death of the biosphere (which may or may not be the same as the death of the planet Earth, depending on how things go), the death of the sun and thus our solar system, the death of the Milky Way, and eventually reaches the death of the entire univerise. This is a book about the inevitable. For me, unfortunately, it's not grim enough.
I believe Chris Impey may just not be a morbid enough person. He keeps getting sidetracked into interesting science. He also seems to be an omnivorous scientist, or at least omnivorous science enthusiast. His actual specialty for reseach is "observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the evolution and structure of galaxies", none of which I even knew was a thing to specialize in.
Make no mistake, he does work in a lot of disaster scenarios. The collision of the Milky Way galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy. Our sun running out of hydrogen to fuse into helium, and expanding to a size large enough to swallow Mercury and leave the Earth a scorched and barren rock. We learn about the origin of actuarial science, the mathematical study of how we will die, and how soon.
Impey is by nature an optimist, though, and he ends up telling us a great deal about various schemes to attempt immortality, for ourselves or our species. Perhaps he doesn't think a book entirely about how we will (not may) end up dead is not one with enough of a market. He might be right in that. Me, I wanted more talk about death, and less about (mostly hopeless) schemes to try to cheat it. But, that may just be me.
If you are wanting a sunny and optimistic book looking at how you, your planet, your sun, your galaxy, and your universe are all going to end someday, this is the book for you.
This book would have been a three except that I love the subject matter so much! Aaron says I've been a little morbid since the day he met me. Some of the concepts were over my head, and I noticed a few little errors here and there that made me think it needed a better proof reader. But overall I really enjoyed it!
I read /How It Ends: From You to the Universe/, by Chris Impey:
Fascinating stuff, packed with science made easy to understand, woven together.
Impey starts with humans and our mortality, then mammals and other creatures, then goes down to viruses and bacteria. To discuss how it all ends he has to start with how it all began.
He discusses the universe, the earth and moon, the milky way galaxy, and how it's all going to end.
But yet, somehow, it's comforting to know and not depressing, especially since we still have about 5 billion years before the end of the universe in either of the two prevailing theories.
It's all OK though. Elon Musk, having reached and taken us to Mars soon to avoid Earth's impending catastrophes, will move us all to a new universe before the end. Trust me on this one.