Book Review: Death from the Skies

You'll often see stuff from Phil Plait in the Friday Links collections. Phil is an astronomer who used to work on the the Hubble Telescope. He's the blogger behind the Bad Astronomy site. He's the goto guy if you're holding a discussion about Moon landing related conspiracy theories. Late last year he also released a book called "Death from the Skies: These Are the Ways the World Will End".

This is a topic that interests Yummy. She gets creeped out by images of peopleless cities but is fascinated by stories of extermination events. So when Phil's book came out I wanted to get her a copy. But Phil offered signed copies early on through the James Randi Educational Foundation [randi.org] and I wanted to get her one of those. But I had ordering issues. They insisted on certain credit card information but had no field for enter this vital info. Before I could get it working they were all cleaned out. Same with the second batch he signed. But I wanted a signed copy. I tried to get friends to take a book to a talk he was giving at an observatory in New York to no avail. He was actually in DC to give a talk at a conference. While the conference was free you had to RSVP well in advance of when I knew he'd be here. I did get him to send me an autographed sticker to slap in the book. So Yummy finally got her autographed book last Friday on our 10 month anniversary.

Let me tell you about the book. Each chapter covers a different way that all life on Earth, and in some cases the whole Earth, could be wiped out. They start with a narrative that presents the disaster as it might be seen in a movie. Then he switches gears and tells the hard science in a way that is easy to read and easier to understand. Oh, sure, when he gets to black holes all sense and reason goes out the window, but I did finally understand why so many shows present them with a swirling ring of dust coming in along the equatorial plane and jets of matter spewing out at the poles.

As a blogger on an astronomy site he's had plenty of opportunity over the years to present this same data in different formats and receive questions from commentors. He knows what you're not going to understand and addresses it accordingly.¹ Some things, like the behavior of superdense globs of neutrinos, cause him to explain the same idea over and over in multiple chapters so that it's fresh in your mind. He doesn't just reference the technical term and tell you to look back at chapter 2.

He talks about asteroid strikes both past and future (alas, when 99942 Apophis passes within the Moon's orbit in 2029 we North Americans will be turned away from the close pass). He talks about rogue planets and stars, talks about different ways that a star will die and what they'd do to our atmosphere if it happened close to us, meandering black holes, alien invasion as he predicts it would happen, passing through nebulas, and ways to move the planet or an asteroid if necessary.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a strong enough reader to make it though a Harry Potter book.
If you pick up your copy at the James Randi Education Foundation it will be cheaper than in the stores and the JREF will get some money from the sale. [link]

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¹I should say that he knows what you don't understand if you're a reasonable but only modestly educated person. Young Earth Creationists are beyond his understanding.