I am a former Russian journalist and a documentary filmmaker who has also worked at NASA in the US.

"The Anatomy of Russian Defense Conversion" touches on many more subjects then just Russian Defense Industry. This is a very thorough, informative and important work that analyses the history of US and Russian Defense Industries, weapons exports and conversion, and possibilities of transformation from a militarized to a civilian economy in the new millenium.

The book also reflects on the current state of defense industries in the US and Russia, and "brain drain", or loss of intellectual capital in Russia and other countries after the Cold War.

I found reflections in Arkady Yarovsky's chapter "From the Culture of War to the Culture of Peace" very contemporary, especially in the light of recent events in the Middle East:

"Our time is unfortunately still characterized as "the culture of war." The culture of war is evident first and foremost in the hostilities between people and states, between nations and faiths, and in the inability to solve conflicts by peaceful means... Humanity has made it into the third millenium because the lust for power has been restrained by fear of nuclear war, but this restraint is not to be counted on permanently... The danger hidden in the separateness of people of different countries, unfortunately, remains a legacy for the next century... If humanity renounces the legacy of the culture of war, it can start down the road of cooperation, peaceful creation, and enlightenment. This is the only road leading to the culture of peace."

One can imagine that I, as a small child living in San Antonio, Texas, next to three Air Force bases and an Army base, living through the Cuban missile crisis, thought about the threat of the Russian military. I also met my parents' wonderful emigre' friends, and to this day have had warm relations with Russian people.

This book tells of the enormous cost to the Russian people of building and maintaining their war industry for so many years, a militarized economy where people got second best. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, defense industry just about shut down, but civilian industry has not grown great enough to support the population. There are horrendous unemployment, and terrible health and social problems. There is some danger that the path of least resistance for Russia, if we neglect the situation, could be to re-start weapons production, for export at first.

In my opinion, the United States also, to a lesser degree, has neglected the manufacture of quality consumer goods, importing them instead, and has let its physical economy deteriorate, despite much activity in the financial sector. We, too, have been insufficiently careful of the environment. This book provides some idea of what these trends could lead to, if carried to extremes.

Perhaps the involvement of United States companies in Russia, could lead to more of a recognition here, of the importance of the physical economy. Hopefully, both countries could also work to put industry on a healthy environmental footing as well.

There is awareness of the problem of Russian defense conversion, at high levels of our government. I hope this book helps educate people and sustain that interest.

Even though you won't find pictures inside this little book, that problem can be easily solved bringing a camera to your trip to Edinburgh, and/or buying some postcards. Inside this guide you will find a lot of useful information (anything you could need to know). The maps are very clear; it gives you some good advises about when to go to the Scottish Capital; and the prices you will find here are essential (specially if you want to find cheaper places to sleep). I enjoyed my stay there, and without any doubts I would like to visit this beautiful city again. You will be impressed with your first sight of the Edinburgh Castle, and believe me, you would like to read this guide from the start until the end.

We used this little book all the time on our trip to Edinburgh. We had a great trip, it sure is a beautiful city and nice people too. We found the restaurants and hotels recommended were good. We would recommend this book to anyone going to Edinburgh. We hope to go back for the festival one day.

There is much to learn from the Nisga'a, a native band in Canada's north who have fought for over a century to win basic individual rights and a recognition of their ancient nation. And no white man knows more about the Nisga'a and their efforts to sign their first treaty with the Canadian government than Tom Molloy, the chief government negotiator. In "The World is Our Witness," Molloy skillfully lays out the sometimes arcane details of the treaty without ever getting bogged down in technicalities. Rather, he captures the spirit of a proud people struggling to find their place in the modern world. With ethnic tensions and tribalism on the rise everywhere, Canada's treatment of its Indians raises hope that there is another way. And in "The World is our Witness," Tom Molloy tells this important and moving story with clarity and conviction.

Having been involved in the negotiation of treaties in Canada for the past 15 years I highly recommend this book. It is not the dry, legalistic tome that you might expect it to be, but Mr Molloy has imbued it with the personal touches about the negotiation and the negotiation process. His anecdotes ring true to life, and although I was not involved in the Nisgaa negotiations, similar occurences have happened to me in all the treaty negotiations that I have been involved in over the years. It's the book that we all wish we could have written.

Truth be told, I'm quite familiar with the scenario of the Earth's future obliteration due to the inexorable process of entropy, on the planet and in the Sun itself. Nevertheless, the book greatly expanded on this knowledge, highlighting the latest discoveries and theory, and all the while presenting them in a wonderfully readable, engaging style.

There are a few forgettable typos and inaccuracies, at least in the text I read, but they are not at all distracting from the overall theme of the book: that the Earth, and particularly its biosphere is doomed to regress to primitivism before its final annihilation, in a sort of reverse parody of life's advancement thus far. If there is one detail that prevents it from getting five stars, it's the chapter on asteroid impacts and gamma ray bursts. Though interesting, asteroid impacts have been covered thoroughly by numerous other works, while the possible role of GRBs in mass extinctions is too hypothetical to be very useful, IMO. In short, I felt this chapter interrupted the flow of the book and distracted it from the theme; that's just my opinion though, and I could be wrong.

All in all though, this is a great book that I highly recommend, especially to neophytes to the topic.

P.S.--Though I haven't read Rare Earth yet, from what I know of it I definitely agree with the authors: This book is really a companion to Rare Earth, and both should probably be read together as a set.

It might be that professors Ward and Brownlee are working on a new genre: non-fiction science fiction. Instead of speculations embedded in story form they speculate about the future in a narrative without plot or characterization or other elements of the story form. Of course they are not the only writers doing this, but they are among the best in a growing industry.

Well, what about it? I gave up reading most science fiction years ago because either the story elements were wooden or the science was ridiculous (or both). It is not easy to be simultaneously a master story teller and a polymath of science. We know that (e.g.) Asimov, Clarke and Sagan were exceptions and were able to combine both tale and cutting edge knowledge very well, and in some cases spectacularly well. But their world is gone. Today's science is much more complex. To write convincingly about the future it is not enough to be a world expert in one's chosen field. The future is influenced by science of all kinds; consequently it is requisite that one be an expert in a number of scientific disciplines just to avoid naive projections.

So it is natural that Peter Ward, who is a geologist and zoologist, (and, by the way, a sometimes poetic prose stylist, witness his expositions in Future Evolution [2001]), and Brownlee, who is an astronomer and NASA scientist, might join forces to augment their individual expertise; and that they might eschew the story form in writing about the future.

At any rate, this is an excellent book of speculation about the future of our planet aimed at a general readership. It is a fine follow-up to their Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000). As in that book their conclusions are pessimistic. They concluded in Rare Earth that we are probably alone in the galaxy; here they conclude that we will go extinct without getting beyond our solar system. This bleak prognosis should not unduly trouble us however since our demise by their calculation is at least millions of years in the future, possibly hundreds of millions of years. In fact their scenario reverses the biological experience of the planet: things will get hotter and drier until life necessarily retreats back into the ocean, and then as the oceans evaporate, life forms regress from the complex to the simple until the only life left on the planet is single-celled, as it was three billion years ago. And then of course the sun expands into a red giant and the earth is burned to a crisp.

Is there any escape? Not according to Ward and Brownlee who argue effectively that it is unlikely that we will acquire the ability and the will to even terra form Mars or other places in the Solar System. The idea that we might become interstellar travelers is also quashed as being impractical in the extreme. They conclude "Interstellar travel will likely never happen, meaning we are stranded in this solar system forever." (p. 207)

While I tend to agree with Ward and Brownlee for the most part, as I did with their conclusions in Rare Earth, I think we should realize that their argument in part is a bit beside the point since in millions of years (at most)--not tens of millions, not hundreds of millions and certainly not billions of years--we will no longer be human anyway. The average life span of a species is something like a million years. Because of the incredibly rapid pace of cultural evolution it is highly unlikely that humans as presently constituted will be around in even a thousand years. Some people think we will be part software and part machine before this century is out. Also as science fiction writers have pointed out, the constraints on our species as presently constituted (in terms of our ability to travel in space and to influence cosmic processes) may not apply to the creatures we are becoming.

Ward and Brownlee do not consider this point of view, most likely because it would be extraneous to the scope of their book. So some of their ideas should be considered as stimulative and consciousness-raising, not definitive. As they acknowledge in the epilogue, "Prophecy is a risky business..." (p. 210) Furthermore, most of their material is on the purely physical changes that will take place on planet earth as it evolves toward its ultimate fate, and I have no doubt that the picture that Ward and Brownlee present is as accurate as present knowledge allows.

I was especially intrigued by their discussion of the return of the once and future supercontinent, Gondwanaland, and how its reconfiguration will affect earth's climate. Their exposition on the carbon dioxide cycle and the end of plant life when the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere falls below 10 ppm was also fascinating. The chapter asking the question, "What Trace Will We Leave?" really gives the lie to human vanity, reminding me of the sentiments in Shelley's poem "Ozymandias." If anything, Ward and Brownlee are even more pessimistic than the poet, pointing out that our proud "messages in a bottle" sent into interstellar space are not likely to impact "a planet within a trillion years," by which time there won't be any planets. (p. 186)

While most of the book is very well written and edited, some of the sentences in the later chapters are less carefully constructed. There are even some gaffs. For example on page 192 they repeat an error from their previous book, stating that there are "between 200 million and 300 million" stars in our galaxy, when the number is more like 100 billion plus. Also on page 194 they give the Drake Equation enhanced with new terms they think appropriate, but in fact the equation is without explanation shorter than Drake's Equation given on page 192.

In their book ' The Life and Death of Planet Earth', Peter Ward, a Paleontologist, and Donald Brownlee, an astronomer, both well-respected professors at the University of Washington, introduce the field of astrobiology, which is the science of how planets and organisms live and perish.

This relatively new field of science uses a composite of information and theories from astronomy, physics, biology as well as data collected from other specific scientific disciplines. The two use this info to explain their theories of how and when the Earth's multi-billion year lifespan will finally come to an end, as well as what will happen to the organisms present on the planet around that time.

Ward and Brownlee paint an excellent picture of the Earth's ultimate fate, and allow the reader to not only understand, but also appreciate the mechanisms working within our planet.

Astrobiology, the subject of this excellent book, is a science still in eager anticipation of its first object of contemplation. Professors Ward and Brownlee from the University of Washington, the former a geologist, the latter an astronomer, argue very strongly that such an object will not be what we would call an animal or a metazoan. Certainly the word "intelligent" will not apply to the first extraterrestrial. Their thesis is that our earth is indeed rare, the product of innumerable rare events and unusual conditions, so much so that we should expect to find similar circumstances elsewhere only very rarely. Acknowledging the recent discoveries of extremophiles, single-celled organisms that can live in very harsh environments, the authors aver that microbial life, on the other hand, should be plentiful. They believe, nonetheless, that the leap from microbes to complex life forms is a very rare event indeed.

Their argument is based on all the things that can go wrong. They cite a formidable litany of hindrances including the need for a planet to be the right size at the right distance from a star of the right size and composition, to the need for plate tectonics (for biotic diversity and the recycling of materials) and a large moon (to stabilize the planet's tilt and temperature), to a Jupiter to sweep the system relatively free of deadly planet-crossing bodies, and especially to a very long time period in which to evolve, etc.

Their argument is tantalizing and difficult to fault. We have only one example of the rise of complex life, and it seems reasonable to conclude that the factors that allowed this life to evolve are necessary. But I am troubled. If I look at the factors that led to my birth, my birth as exactly me, the whole process seems rather miraculous. If my parents had never met, if my mother had had a headache that night, if, in fact, she or my father had behaved in any way differently from exactly how they did behave during the time up and including my conception, another little sperm might have fertilized the egg and I would not exist. Or, take a hand at bridge. If you are dealt 13 spades, you can be pretty sure that something fishy is going on since the odds against getting exactly 13 spades are astronomical. However, the odds against being dealt any other exact hand at bridge are also astronomical, in fact the odds are identical. But some combination of cards must be dealt! So the fact that the development of complex life on this planet seems miraculous in the sense that everything had to be just right for it to develop may be a misconception. I think it's akin to the anthropic principle. If our solar system were different perhaps some other creatures would be here rhapsodizing over just how miraculous all the coincidences were that produced them!

The authors, of course, are talking about carbon-based "life as we know it." Since it is massively difficult to speculate on life as we don't know it, especially when considering that 90% of the universe, the so-called mysterious dark matter, is still totally beyond our ken, they are wise to qualify the argument. I would add that life may take on forms and modes that we wouldn't recognize as being "alive." It may be, for example, that the stars are "alive." We know that they are born, they grow, reproduce and die. They spew their seeds, the heavy elements out into space where they attract other elements and form new stars. Such life would be "life as we wouldn't recognize it." There is also the possibility that life may take on forms and modes totally beyond our comprehension, giving us "life as we can't possibly know it." An example would be my friends "the energy beings" who live, reproduce and disappear in a small fraction of a nanosecond, too quick for us ever to be aware of them.

Yes, one may, I hope, speculate. Certainly that is what the authors are doing here. Regardless of how carefully they conform to what is currently known in a scientific sense, and regardless of how carefully those speculations are expressed, they are postulating from a sampling of one. But the authors know this. On page 282 they write, "The great danger to our thesis...is that it is a product of our lack of imagination. We assume in this book that animal life will be somehow Earth-like. We take perhaps the jingoistic stance that...lessons from Earth are not only guides but also rules." Nonetheless they say that "evidence and inference" lead them to believe that the earth is very rare indeed.

There is some redundant repetition from chapter to chapter, which can happen with two authors, and there are the usual "spell-checker" typos, i.e., "out" for "our," etc., that occasionally mar the text, but no more than usual. On page 267, however, they estimate that there are between 200 and 300 million stars in our galaxy. Of course the number is more like 100 billion. They probably meant that there are 200 to 300 million "sun-like" stars in our galaxy. These quibbles aside, I think that the significant value of this book is that, in the process of arguing for their rare earth, Ward and Brownlee are able to share with us their formidable understanding of the latest findings in a number of sciences, especially geology, biology and astronomy, and apply that knowledge to astrobiology. The material on tectonics and mass extinctions is especially interesting. Their recreation of the impact and aftermath of the object that hit the earth at the end of the Cretaceous is strikingly vivid. More than this, it is their enthusiasm in presenting the material that makes this excellent book so very interesting and readable.

This is one of the most astonishing books I have ever read. Its thesis, that complex life similar to life on the Earth, is probably very rare in the galaxy, if not the universe. The authors meticulously build a case for Earth's special place in the cosmos, showing how bacterial life might be common but that anything bigger than simple organisms might not be able to survive the ravages of time and comets and wandering axial tilt. As other readers have pointed out, this doesn't necessarily mean that silicon-based life or some other kind of life can't exist in the universe, but it does demonstrate that Fermi's Dilemma might in fact be true. As a science fiction writer, I was stunned at how much this book could change the way science fiction is written. No more Star Trek universes with complex life in every system, no more "federations" or "foundations" or "assemblies" of thousands of inhabited worlds. According to the thesis Ward and Brownlee present, habitable worlds might be few and far between. Humans may very well find no other worlds beyond the Earth upon which to live. RARE EARTH will make it difficult to read books or watch movies that envision a galaxy filled with wonderful and curious creatures, where humans spread out across the galaxy as if they were so many islands in Polynesia. And if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true, then we are also obliged to get our act together here and now if we are going to become a space-going species. I think this book puts a lot of science fiction writers out of business. It certainly makes a lot of science fiction, including my own, seem downright silly.

"Rare Earth" pulls together the latest findings in systematic biology, geology, and astronomy to make a compelling case for the rarity of advanced life ( "sentience") in the universe. Not only are animals rare (a truth grasped viscerally by Walt Whitman when he wrote that "A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels"), so is the flukish appearance of human intelligence. Out of the hundreds of millions or billions of species in earth's history, only one has evolved that has been able to "build that radio telescope." Much to the joy of the silly Creationists, the series of "Great Demotions" that began with Copernicus appears to be ending...

A worthy and useful book. Now a few caveats:

I wish that the authors had explored the ramifications of their low-sentience universe (with which I agree) in a bit more depth. For example, if each Milky Way-like galaxy harbors only, say, ten civilizations at a given time, then (crunching the numbers) in all of the universe there may be only ONE case in which there are inhabited worlds as close together as the sun is to Alpha Centauri - More typically sentient "neighbors" would be tens of thousands of light years apart, and in some galaxies there might be but a single sentience, or none. It's truly sobering to realize how alone we may be.

I was also surprised that Enrico Fermi was not listed in the index. His famous question "Then, where are they?" (and the implied answer: "Not here, anyway") is, to me, as compelling a piece of evidence for the rarity of sentience, as all of the geological and biological arguments that are (convincingly!) marshalled by Ward and Brownlee.

I was happy to see that the authors dedicated their book to Carl Sagan, one of my personal heroes. Sagan's enthusiastic curiosity about the possibility of life beyond earth was tempered by a scientist's ability to accept new, unpleasant facts (unlike those silly Creationists). I'm sure he would have appreciated "Rare Earth."

The pictures of babies were captivating to my young children. It is a very creative take on the familiar story of Jonah.

I think there are many examples in this book, but I found the physical and mathematical model about the cosolvent flushing is not enough, also,I belive more details about the its actual design can help me to understand this remediation methods.