ICARUS 127, 263 (1997)
ARTICLE NO. IS975717
BOOK REVIEW
The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century
Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science.
Steven J. Dick. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK,
1996. 578 pp., $54.95 (hardback).
During the early 1960s, I was fortunate to make the acquaintance in
print of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his protagonist John Carter, who,
thanks to Ballantine Books, were repeating his adventures on Mars in
paperback form. My summer afternoons were spent learning about a
Mars that had once been covered with oceans, but had dried out—leaving
dead sea bottoms behind and requiring an ‘‘atmosphere factory’’ and
planet-wide irrigation to enable its hardy (oviparous!) human inhabitants
to enjoy their life of near continuous warfare and romance.
I was in love with the place.
And then came Mariner 4. The ‘‘real’’ Mars, as increasingly revealed
by the Mariners (4, 6, 7, and 9), might still have dead ‘‘sea bottoms’’—but
no atmosphere factories, no surface water, and a decidedly unromantic
cratering record. The real Mars was not John Carter’s ‘‘Barsoom,’’ and
never had been. I knew that whatever adventure might be had on the
Mars of the Mariners and Vikings would require that the real planet
be appreciated (even loved) for what it truly is and not only for what
imagination had suggested.
That the fictional Mars was not solely the invention of Edgar Rice
Burroughs is one of the lessons of an excellent book by Steven Dick, an
historian at the U.S. Naval Observatory. That some in the public, the
press, and the scientific community will cling to myths about Mars and
about life in the universe long after the data have rendered a different
judgment is another.
I wish that I had been able to read The Biological Universe when I
first worked in NASA’s exobiology program, back in 1986. Dick’s thor-
ough and informative summary of the controversies and discoveries that
have affected the extraterrestrial life debate might not have changed the
course of the program, but it would have been much easier to recognize the
heritage of some of the arguments that from time-to-time were brought to
bear by the public and scientists alike. On reading the book, what struck
me was how many of the arguments of the 19th century are still kept
alive in the 20th. Thus, it is easy to recommend The Biological Universe
to anyone who is interested in planetary exploration for the 21st century
(and the remainder of this one). It is likely that the ghosts of past debates
will continue to surround even the most objective events of future plane-
tary exploration and astronomy.
In the book, Dick provides a relatively unbiased account of the histori-
cal events that have colored the scientific (and to some extent, popular)
discourse on extraterrestrial life, including anthropocentrism and specula-
tions about intelligent life on Mars, UFOs, and SETI. The book contains
a variety of useful bibliographic references to past writings on the subject
(and though it couldn’t hope to be exhaustive on the subject, the book
contains many references not easily found elsewhere). There are, forgiv-
ably, some minor errors in the book (e.g., NASA’s SETI program wasn’t
263
terminated by Congress until October, vice September, 1993; NASA was
the main sponsor of the 1991 Decennial US–USSR Conference on SETI,
etc.) that might be more significant to touchy ex-program managers than
to the general reader. Many more of the (correct) details are made widely
accessible here for the first time.
If the book has any major flaws, they are sins of omission. Because it
was prepared for publication in mid-1996, one can scarcely blame Dick
for omitting an analysis of how the claims made for ALH-84001 might
affect the discourse about life on Mars. The elevation of the Mars-life
debate is a sure indication of how even a little data, and the promise of
more to come, can add ‘‘life’’ to planetary exploration.
Less astute, however, is Dick’s analysis of how the interdisciplinary
field of exobiology has affected modern biological thought. Especially
with respect to the fields of genomics and paleontology, exobiology is
not, in my view, a ‘‘protoscience’’ which ‘‘had little chance of enunciating
a rationale of practical application.’’ Exobiology has provided an opportu-
nity to combine ‘‘established’’ disciplines like physics, biology, and chem-
istry (or more properly, to combine scientists in those fields) and to
gain a synergistic benefit by addressing fundamental scientific questions
through those combinations. The benefits of an exobiological perspective
can be seen in answers to questions like ‘‘What happened to the dino-
saurs?’’, ‘‘Why do we have so much oxygen in the atmosphere?’’, ‘‘When
did life arise on Earth?’’, and the perennial ‘‘Could life exist anywhere
else?’’. So far, the practical applications of an exobiological perspective
have been seen in the use of genetic sequence data to identify the ancient
biochemical relationships that are still important to the health of plants,
animals, and people; in the generation of potential new pharmaceuticals
through directed evolution in the laboratory; and in a variety of new
instrumentation and computational techniques invented to help address
what are essentially biological questions with chemical and physical tools.
Notwithstanding this complaint, the practical contributions (or their
lack) of exobiologists, bioastronomers, and UFOlogists do not constitute
a major focus of the work. Rather, Steven Dick has largely succeeded
in recording the ebb and flow of the discoveries, debates, and dismissals
surrounding the question of life outside of the Earth, and the ability of
science, as an enterprise, to deal with extraterrestrial life as a subject. It
is evident that some of the history covered in this book could be repeated,
if we do not take care to avoid it. The ghosts of these arguments are
alive and well in the public, in Washington, and alas, in science. Dick
has provided us with an enjoyable and useful means of identifying old
ghosts, (re)learning their lessons, and perhaps avoiding them in the future.
His thoughtful recounting should recommend this book to anyone who
in the coming decades might have to deal seriously with the question of
extraterrestrial life.
We should be so lucky!
JOHN D. RUMMEL
Marine Biological Laboratory
Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543
0019-1035/97 $25.00
Copyright  1997 by Academic Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.