David Grinspoon is the recipient of the 2006 Carl Sagan Medal!

Winner of the PEN Center USA's 2004 Literary Award for Research Nonfiction!

"An exuberant, provocative look at the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and what it might mean....Wisecracks, philosophical musings, and personal anecdotes make his text as lively as it is authoritative.  The best look at this subject since Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection."

--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Lonely Planets is a funky natural philosophy of life in the universe written with authority and edge. Dr. Grinspoon uses the topic of ET life as a mirror in which we view human evolution, history, present, and future in cosmic perspective. With an accessible, breezy and often whimsical style, he presents an authoritative scientific narrative of cosmic evolution along with provocative ruminations on how we fit into the story of the universe. In illustrating how we - scientists and nonscientists alike - have projected upon alien life our own philosophies, biases and preconceptions, he exposes the assumptions we make about extraterrestrials, and how these illuminate science and its limitations.

Writing from the perspective of a working scientist who has helped to shape modern planetary exploration, he does not shy away from the spiritual dimensions of the question of ET life. Rather, he shows how both scientific research and "new age" searching on the topic of aliens serve the same deep spiritual urge. Lonely Planets concludes with an impassioned and hopeful description of how a synthesis of our scientific and spiritual capacities can insure our survival into an attainable and wondrous future.

 

Listen to David Grinspoon on NPR,

interviewed by Scott Simon, 12/20/03

Read David Grinspoon's "Slate Diary"

A weeklong journal of an astrobiologist.

  For the latest, coolest Mars             

 images,  click "links" above...

Grab your very own copy two ways:

An autographed First Edition Hardcover from this site!

or

Lonely Planets in Paperback at Amazon!

Paperback edition includes a New Foreword by the author about 2004's amazing new discoveries.

 

An excerpt from the Preface of Lonely Planets

True confession: The whole time I have been writing this book I have had as a companion looking over my shoulder a three and a half foot tall, large headed green alien with big black eyes. He is not flesh-and-blood or even silicon-and-plasma but a squeaky-squeezy plastic inflatable hanging by a string from the ventilation pipe, yet he serves to remind me that, at least as a cultural phenomena, aliens are indeed among us.

Here's how this book is supposed to start: "My fellow humans, we stand here today at the edge of a new age of cosmic discovery which will transform all of our lives. Recent breakthroughs have sparked a scientific revolution, and brought us to the point where we finally know how to search for life in outer space. Any day now, we may meet with success and find proof that we are not alone in the universe. More>>>

 

         SETI SuperStar Award