The Crowded Universe

"This is a more up-to-date story from an astronomer’s standpoint, of the search for extrasolar planets. Alan works at the Carnegie Institute in Washington. He is a real political insider, so there are lots of stories in there of the politics of this whole enterprise. For example, he writes about how NASA is continually starting up programmes and then cancelling them, and Alan is privy to much of this information. He is also a very good scientist: he does computer modelling of the formation of planets. He’s got his own perspective. He is much more astronomical than I am – I am more of a planetary scientist. And this book tells the story over the last decades of the development and research in this field, showing all the successes and frustrations along the way. I read a lot of science fiction growing up and the last book that I have chosen, Intelligent Life in the Universe by the Russian I S Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, is old. It came out in 1968 and that was right before I went to college. I read that book as an undergraduate and I was fascinated, so I would say that Carl Sagan is a big influence on my work and on my thinking."