Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space by Kevin Peter Hand a first-hand account of the epic quest to find life on the water-rich moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Available here. Price:$27.95 / £22.00 ISBN:9780691179513 Published:04/07/2020 Copyright:2020 Pages:304

Beneath the frozen crusts of several of the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn lurk vast oceans that may hold the key to extraterrestrial biology. Could these moons be the best place to look for life beyond Earth? In ALIEN OCEANS, Kevin Peter Hand–one of the NASA scientists leading efforts to land a spacecraft of the surface of Europa–takes readers from the depths of our planet’s oceans to the moons of the outer solar system in search of the answer.

Hand’s pioneering research, recounted here in gripping and accessible detail, has taken him around the world: from diving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, to climbing the glaciers of Kilimanjaro, and exploring the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, there is nowhere Hand won’t go in pursuit of his astrobiological research. In ALIEN OCEANS, he shows how this exploration is informing our understanding of the potential habitability of Saturn and Jupiter’s icy moons, drawing lessons from what we have learned about the origins of life on our own planet to consider how life could arise on these distant worlds.

Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space reviewed

This is a fun, pretty cool book to read. On one hand it is almost inconceivable to imagine that we can even begin to understand what might lie beneath the ice lined surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s most intriguing moons. However humanity’s scientific understanding has advanced to the point that, using physics, chemistry and biology from earth based observations, we can now draw conclusions about other planetary bodies. Earth based science has successful discovered that many of the laws of physics and more apply elsewhere too.

Peter Hand’s enthusiasm is clear to see, and he has written an accessible book that takes the general reader along with him to illustrate what we already know about Io, Callisto, Titan, Ganymede and Europa too. These moons are the areas of most relevant and special interest to us, based on the seriously interesting geological and physical observations that have been deducted, from a mixture of observer flybys, and also spectroscopy analysis. We couldn’t follow every line, and every scientific deduction, but overall most of the book is instantly understandable and raises excitement about how much we have already learned. It also raises interesting questions about what there is still to be discovered and learned about these relatively nearby worlds.

There are also some great visual illustrations too, with lovely colour photos as well to highlight the ice covered moons he is discussing. The one sad element perhaps is the time lag between conceiving worthwhile science experiments and the time it takes to then get then approved, funded, built, launched and then finally, hopefully, returning data. It could be the 2040s at best before some of the questions about these subsurface oceans are answered. This book is a great taster of what there maybe to come, and a positive reminder of how much we are still learning about the worlds beyond earth.

Well here’s some exciting and good news! Congrats to @AstroKDS – from sea to space and back again, this time to the Challenger Deep! https://t.co/RD3seEb6oI

— Kevin Peter Hand (@Alienoceans) June 9, 2020

Kevin Peter Hand is one of today’s leading NASA scientists, and his pioneering research has taken him on expeditions around the world. In this captivating account of scientific discovery, he brings together insights from planetary science, biology, and the adventures of scientists like himself to explain how we know that oceans exist within moons of the outer solar system, like Europa, Titan, and Enceladus.

He shows how the exploration of Earth’s oceans is informing our understanding of the potential habitability of these icy moons, and draws lessons from what we have learned about the origins of life on our own planet to consider how life could arise on these distant worlds.

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