Description:
It has been nearly one hundred years since the Apollo moon landings, when Jack and Vladimir, two astronauts on a mission to Venus, discover a mysterious void related to indigenous life on the planet. Subsequently more voids are detected on Earth, Mars, Titan, and, quite ominously, inside a planetoid emerging from the Kuiper belt.
Jack is sent to investigate the voids in the Solar System and intercept the planetoid--which, as becomes increasingly clear, is inhabited by alien life forms. Jack and his crew will have little time to understand their alien biochemistry, abilities, behavior patterns, resilience, and technology, but also how these life forms relate to the voids.
Humankind's first encounter with these exotic life forms couldn't be more fateful, becoming a race against time to save life on Earth and to reveal the true nature of the voids, which seem to be intrinsically related to life and the universe itself. In this novel, the author combines many topics related to state-of-the-art research in the field of astrobiology with fictional elements to produce a thrilling audiobook.
Brief description:
Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a professor for planetary habitability and astrobiology at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and also an adjunct professor at Washington State University and Arizona State University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and worked afterward as senior project hydrologist at Envirogen, Inc. Dirk continued his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. During that time he was also a faculty fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2004 he took a faculty position, first as an associate professor, then as a full professor at Washington State University. Dirk received the Friedrich-Wilhelm Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation for extraordinary achievements in theoretical biology in 2011. Since 2013 Dirk is a professor at the Technical University Berlin, where he leads the Astrobiology Research Group. He published in the greater research field of habitability and astrobiology nearly two hundred scientific articles and also nine books.
Review Quotes:
"The main theme of this book is the need to keep an open mind regarding the possibilities for diverse forms of life in the solar system and beyond...A lot of food for thought, and well worth reading."
-- "Ian Crawford, The Observatory"