Now that I've wrapped up this work, I'm left with the sense that the title is a little misleading. What one really has here is a history of Jet Propulsion Lab probes to the gas giant planets of our solar system, and what the information that we've gleaned tells us about the potential for life on some of the moons of those planets. This is besides providing a lot of basic background on the biochemistry of life. If this sounds less than inviting you would be wrong, as Hand does a good job of dishing up the history and the hard science in an entertaining fashion, with just enough memoir to give you a sense of the man himself. Recommended. ( )

Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space
by Kevin Peter Hand
Definitely need to be in a brainy mood for part of this book. I took astronomy in college but that's been ages ago! Chapter 2 is mostly a lot of calculations and things that went over my head. The rest of the book mostly broke down the hard to follow calculations into concepts that are easy to understand.
The author described his search for life in the oceans of planets and moons, mainly the moons of Saturn. He also described being in a deep sea diving expedition and things went south! I listened to the audio version and he sounded calm but I would have been frantic! He also described the wonders he saw!
He is on the team to send a mission to explore Saturn's moons. The author's enthusiasm is contagious. I wonder if any life will be found in those unique oceans? I hope I live long enough to find out! ( )

A look at the moons of the solar system that have, or might have, oceans underneath a layer of ice, and the prospects for life on such worlds. The book does go into a fair amount of scientific detail, and while it does explain the basic concepts of physics, chemistry, and biology behind the ideas it's talking about, I'd say it's the kind of science writing where you do have to be pretty into the nitty-gritty science-y stuff, as opposed to just wanting a gosh-wow interplanetary travelogue. The writing isn't really engaging enough to be satisfying in itself, either, although it's perfectly fine. But if you are into the nitty-gritty science-y details, they can get pretty interesting. The description of the indirect methods used to figure out the composition of moons during spacecraft flybys elicited an "Oh, that's really cool!" out of me when I read about it, it was just such a clever combination of various kinds of scientific reasoning.

Most of the discussion of the possibilities for life on these places is very much what the author refers to as "fun speculation," and even if it's speculation very much informed by scientific understanding, it is important to note that it is 100% speculative, sometimes very imaginatively so. It is fun, though, if you're interesting in thinking about, say, how life forms that evolve around geothermal vents underwater might develop something that could be considered farming. For instance. ( )

I've read a number of books on alien worlds and they have been mostly forgettable, still, it's interesting and important enough to keep looking. This one I will not forget anytime soon. It is about a specific type of alien place, those with a frozen ocean. Our solar system has a few moons such as Europa and some others that are frozen ocean worlds. Kevin Hand is not a journalist but an expert and he goes into depth on how we know this, what we know, and what we can conclude or reasonably guess. It turns out there is a pretty good possibility of life in these oceans, and it would be strange life, if you can imagine an ocean 300,000 feet deep with a similar depth ice cap over top. There's a lot of science here but it makes you feel smarter and at some point you start to enter this new world that he describes unlike anything I have ever experienced. It's not SciFi its better.

He also mentioned a theory that life originated as a way to increase entropy in the universe, through metabolism. As we consume things it moves the universe from order to disorder. Think of the damage humans are causing to the natural world for example, we are literally entropy machines. If this is true, then the universe wants us to expand and continue increasing entropy. Maybe. Wishful thinking perhaps that it's OK to kill off other species and the environment. We probably will not know what's in these oceans for 40-80 years, unless there is a dramatic budget increase or private venture, so for our lifetimes all we can do speculate and imagine through the great insights of scientists like Kevin Hand. ( )

An excellent overview of the subject of the search for life in the oceans of the moons of the outer planets. He's quite good at making complex things understandable and relatable, and his enthusiasm is contagious. The book drags a little at the end when he comes up against the problems of actually doing the exploring, but that's inevitable. I would rate this a must-read for anyone interested in space exploration in general and the search for extraterrestrial life specifically. ( )