Book Review: Death From The Skies!

There are a lot of things to worry about in life.  Are you forgetting someone’s birthday?  Is there going to be enough money in your checking account when that huge bill hits?  Who’s going to be the next U.S. president, and what does that mean for our everyday lives?  Is an asteroid the size of Texas going to collide with the planet, wiping out all signs that there was ever life here?  An astronomer and writer named Phil Plait has put a lot of thought into these questions, and he has some answers.  That is, about the asteroid: the birthday and bills are your own problems.

I’ve been following the author’s blog for several years, and I find his writing to be at times interesting, funny, and even awe-inspiring.  He’s sort of a cross between Carl Sagan and James Randi: able to describe clouds of dust and gas in a way that makes you glad to be alive, but not at all hesitatant to call a spoon a spoon when he thinks people are fooling themselves or each other.  So what of his book?

Death From The Skies is a story of nine apocalypses.  Each of its chapters is devoted to a different astronomical event that would spell the end of the human race – and most other life on the planet.  He starts small, with rocks smacking into us, and ups the ante with each chapter.  By the time he’s done you’ve heard about casually devastating alien invasions, black holes passing through the planet as if it was made of air, and the end of matter and time as we know them.  The thing that raises this book above the level of a typical shock-value show on television, though, is the amount of real information he provides about each of the cataclysms.  You learn how likely we think it is that a black hole will really show up, and why we think that.  You learn in gorey detail why a nearby supernova would be absolutely devastating, and then you learn how many stars are close enough to actually be a concern.  Each chapter starts with a story of what the cataclysm would be like, but the chapter is not the least bit fear-mongering.

The book slips an entertaining overview of astronomy amongst the death and mayhem.  When you’re finished, you’ll likely have a better understanding of where humanity stands in the universe – and what kinds of things we should be learning to protect ourselves from.  Space is unfathomably vast, and there are many ways we could be wiped out.  Many of the events he describes aren’t likely to happen within our lifetimes, but the book makes an excellent case that it’s imperative that we learn as much as we can about what’s out there so we’ll be better equipped to handle anything that does come our way.

One of my favorite cataclysms is the gamma ray burst.  Have you ever played Final Fantasy VII?  The game, like most Final Fantasy games, lets you summon monsters who make a single devastating attack and then vanish.  In VII, you gradually obtain ever-more-powerful versions of Bahamut: a flying dragon who shoots a beam of energy at your enemies.  The climax to the series is Bahamut Zero, who fires a massively powerful beam from orbit.  Gamma ray bursts make this attack look puny!  It is as if Bahamut was the size of a star, and fired a beam wider than the planet itself.  Every living thing on the side of the planet facing the burst would be dead.  There’s just no withstanding that.  This book is full of deliciously devastating possibilities like that, and they’re all possible.  Several of them are certainties!  That is, if you’re planning to exceed your average life expentency by several orders of magnitude.

It’s an entertaining and informative book, and I recommend it to anyone who likes explosions, science, or just looking up at the night sky.