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This year, leading thinkers asked how humanity became so fragile, what other life could exist in the universe, and whether it’s already here
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The best science books of 2024 tell an extraordinary story about life. The chance that strange lifeforms evolve in strange places has emerged to be far greater than we realised even 10 years ago. If, on Earth, bacteria can be found in acids, rocks, ice and environments 1,000 times more radioactive than would be necessary to kill you and me, then why not on a moon of Jupiter or the hydrocarbon seas of Titan?
Any living thing needs room to breathe, and Mark Miodownik’s It’s a Gas (Viking, £22) does a fine job of explaining how even invisible, odourless and colourless matter exploits and shapes empty space. We, in our turn, exploit it: Miodownik reveals how much the construction of technology depends on our ability to manipulate hot air. The author Tom Chatfield wouldn’t disagree. Wise Animals (Picador, £20) is his not uncritical account of how technology has made us what we are. Now that our blood fizzes with traces of technologically-induced immunity against diseases, and our phones pulse with messages from friends halfway across the world, we forget we’re driven by appetites and anxieties that are common to all animals.
Meanwhile, technology is rapidly shifting how we look at the night sky, according to astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger. She should know, having been instrumental in the deployment of the hugely complex James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021. Intertwining science with professional autobiography, her book Alien Earths (Allen Lane, £25) describes just how rich and hospitable our cosmos has become. If life does turn out to be rare in the universe, it won’t be for lack of places to inhabit.
And that’s just the life we stand a chance of noticing. What about all the life that’s so unlike our own, we’d struggle to spot it? In Life As No One Knows It (Bridge Street, £25), Sara Imari Walker turns to mathematics and physics to explain how living systems may be operating beneath our notice. Never mind the possibility of a real-life ET: could an invisible “shadow biome”, with its own lifecycles and metabolism, be flourishing even now on Earth? Earth’s lively geology is essential, at least for our kind of life — and as Robert Muir-Wood demonstrates in This Volcanic Isle (Oxford UP, £25), the 66-million-year history of the British Isles provides us with an extraordinary record of it. Geological time operates differently to our own, and it has rarely been so thrillingly translated into terms we lay readers can enjoy.
Much has been written about sex and genetics, but not nearly enough about eggs. Jules Howard’s Infinite Life (Elliot & Thompson, £20) redresses that balance: it’s an evolutionary account that bravely sidelines adult organisms, and concentrates instead on the new generation, including the fascinating eggs of the Silurian millipedes, which nested in what looks suspiciously like a gob of phlegm. (Human babies, on the other hand, are fed by the most energy-sapping placenta in the world.)
As well as through genetics, humans perpetuate themselves through culture. Sometimes we confuse the two, and that’s where folklore steps in, with giants and dwarves and faeries and the rest. In The Tomb of the Mili Mongga (Bloomsbury, £20), evolutionary biologist Samuel Turvey tells of his comically frustrated efforts, on an Indonesian island rife with tall tales, to substantiate local rumours of a new species of hominin. Then, sitting uneasily between culture and genetics, comes human memory. This curious cognitive function evolved to inform our actions in the present, but we’ve since harnessed it to record and recount the past. Charan Ranganath’s Why We Remember (Faber, £20) explains how this development has been possible at all – and why memory can be so devilishly unreliable.
Life would be a lot simpler and a lot less angst-ridden if we could simply live forever, and this is the prospect held out by neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikov-Johnston’s The Future Loves You, out later this month (Allen Lane, £25). Zeleznikov-Johnston’s enthusiasm is intoxicating, but he can count me out. The longer we extend life, it seems to me, the more we have to medicalise it, and the less private and authentic that life will become.
Finally, Transient and Strange (WW Norton, £22), a series of autobiographical essays by the science journalist Nell Greenfieldboyce, offers a humanistic corrective, as it modestly accounts for a life well spent. Using science to understand everything from black holes to tornadoes to the paths taken by meteors, among many other subjects, has enriched the author’s life as well as her intellect. Greenfieldboyce reminds us that knowledge is more than just an acquisition: it enables us to feel the world more deeply.
Simon Ings’s books include Engineers of Human Souls. To order any of the books above at a discount, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
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