We're special but are we significant?

How special are we? We no longer consider ourselves the center of the universe, but we are in a fortuitous place and time for understanding our place in the universe, and complex life can exist at the nexus of order and chaos at least we have one data point.

Most of the current thought about our place in the universe rest on false premises and incorrect conclusions. This book gently takes the listener through the step by step process necessary in order to think about the problem in the most correct way. We generally make two kinds of a error in thinking about the problem 'a priori' and 'a posteriori' errors, before the fact and after the fact. (Did you know that most biographies on Thomas Bayes start off with the statement "he was probably born in 1701", funny stuff and this book will tell you why that kind of thinking is needed to understand our place in the universe).

There our subtle faults in most fine tuning arguments and purely probabilistic arguments for calculating life such as the Drake's Equation (though, I don't think the author used the eponymous equation by name). The author looks at both the telescopic and microscopic data we have, and for example delves into the Prokaryotic (simple single cell) merging into a Eukarotic (complicated single cell, the building block of complex life) and how unusual such an event really is.

This book is full of cool ways of thinking about the problem. I did not realize how unstable our solar system is and how our current epoch or order within our solar system will almost for sure not last for more than 10 million years or so. The planets orbits aren't stable and the three body problem's solution is always robust (sensitive to initial conditions). The architecture we have to observe leads to how we understand, and the better our tools the better are data becomes.

The author is just a good science writer. His books should be read by a larger audience, because he really does explain science that well. The author doesn't answer the question whether or not we are the only complex life in the universe, but he teaches the listener how to think about the problem so as not to make the common errors in thought while thinking about the problem.

7 people found this helpful

TL;DR: Earth isn't that rare

This book is about the rare Earth hypothesis. TL;DR: Earth isn't that rare, and we don't know if life has formed on other planets, or how often simple life evolves into complex life.

The author overuses flowery language and dumbs down topics, inappropriately avoiding scientific jargon.

The narrator mispronounces "eukaryotic" several dozen times.

Greet insight into our place in the cosmos

Great look by a working astrophysicist into the uniqueness or lack thereof of our solar system and of life on our planet. He concludes that we are probably pretty dang special contravening the prevailing extreme Copernicus assumptions that have held sway for some time in conventional physics.

1 person found this helpful

Speculation abounds endlessly

There were interesting anecdotes here and there, but it re treaded the same titrd ground over and over.

1 person found this helpful

What is known and what me think we know.

An revelation making for a trip through the universe that will allow you to samle the the very strange things that may exist.

Unusual problem: sound quality is poor

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Very high scientific quality.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Caleb Scharf?

Narration was fine.

Any additional comments?

Sound track has jumps, every few seconds, making it sometimes difficult to understand.

1 person found this helpful