Asteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed Will Determine Our Future in Space

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Nigel Patterson
Audiobook
9 hr 58 min
Unabridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

A unique, wide-ranging examination of asteroid exploration and our future in space Human travel into space is an enormously expensive and unforgiving endeavor. So why go? In this accessible and authoritative book, astrophysicist Martin Elvis argues that the answer is the asteroid exploration, for the strong motives of love, fear, and greed. Elvis's personal motivation is one of scientific love-asteroid investigations may teach us about the composition of the solar system and the origins of life. A more compelling reason may be fear-of a dinosaur killer-sized asteroid hitting our planet. Finally, Elvis maintains, we should consider greed: asteroids likely hold vast riches, such as large platinum deposits, and mining them could provide both a new industry and a funding source for bolder space exploration. Elvis explains how each motive can be satisfied, and how they help one another. From the origins of life, to "space billiards," and space sports, Elvis looks at how asteroids may be used in the not-so-distant future.

About the author

Martin Elvis is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow with the UK Science Research Council. He has researched X-ray astronomy, black holes, and quasars-and now asteroids. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

British audiobook narrator and AudioFile Earphones Award winner Nigel Patterson has many credits as a stage, screen, and voice-over actor that influence his powerful characterization across a broad range of genres. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he is fluent in French and Spanish.

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