Hi,
I find space and space exploration incredibly fascinating and want to learn more about it. I‘m open for everything as long as it’s non-fiction. What I find particularly interesting is the exploration of space (interstellar travel, colonies etc.) and how other star systems like Alpha Centauri may look, what planets there are, which kinds of planets…
I appreciate any suggestions! thanks!
by Endo279
3 Comments
*Astrobiology* by Plaxco and Gross
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos all the way! And if you’re open to something readable but more heavily physics-focused, Black Holes, Wormholes & Time Machines by Jim Al-Khalili
I love everything Neil Degrasse Tyson. His most popular book (I’m guessing) is Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. It’s a great, fast read about all the coolest stuff in space, like black holes and nebulae. He also did one recently called Accessory to War, which is more a history book about bow military and space exploration have always been linked (technological advances in one often lead to advances in the other). He co-wrote a much longer book called Welcome To the Universe, which starts out pretty simple but then gets more dense as they introduce more math and physics to explain more exotic ideas about space.
I also really love The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne, who is a famous physicist and he was the science advisor on the movie Interstellar (directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Matthew McCoughnehey). Nolan wantrd every science thing in the movie to be based in real science – or at least real scientific theory. So Thorne explains the theoru behind everhthing from the blighg on earth destroying ojr food source, to the wormhole the crew jumps through to a new solar system, to whqt goes on inside the black hole Gargantua at the end of the movie.
My final suggestion is Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb. Loeb is a theoretical physicist at Harvard. You might remember a few years ago the first observed intersteller item was observed, most likely an asteroid that was a cigar shape and theh gave it some Hawaii’an name. Well Loeb is pretty much the only scientist who thinks it was actually either an alien space ship or a piece of ancient alien tech like a satellite. Everyone disagreed with him (including Neil Degrasse Tyson), but he wrote this book to present his argument. Since you mentioned alpha centauri, this book also has some stuff about a project Loeb joined calked Starshot, which is supposed to create some kind of technology that could make it to alpha centauri and send back data within our lifetimes (to my knowledge the project is stalled, but it’s still interesting).