About 15 years ago, The University of Washington instituted one of the first astrobiology programs in the United States. That fledgling program consisted of about a dozen faculty and as many graduate students from seven departments attempting to get a handle on the wide diversity of astronomy, biology, chemistry, and geology. Experts flew in and faculty held “shotgun” seminars. All of us struggled, wildly out of our depth with topics we hadn't addressed since high school. Biologists puzzled over orbital dynamics (what is obliquity anyway?). Astronomers couldn't remember the Krebs cycle. Grad students enrolled in undergraduate courses in microbiology and geology. Eventually, the graduate students banded together to offer our own course designed to distill the jargon and themes of these major areas into one accelerated, comprehensive course that would bring us all up to speed. We called it The Astrobiology Primer and published it for the community.
Longstaff's book would have saved us so much time! It strives to be a comprehensive primer to a diverse and complicated field. It would have been the obvious choice for our Primer course. It has—for this astronomer, at any rate—a refreshing amount of biology. This is not surprising given the author's background in biochemistry. But his return to astronomy and planetary science as a student provides some excellent perspective on the field.
All of the chapter and section headings are simple declarative statements or questions, such as “1.4.5: Many Low Mass Stars Become Red Giants,” or “6.1.4: Living Systems Are Capable of Reproduction.” This structure makes reading the table of contents almost like an abstract for the book and quickly gives the reader an overview of the entire field.
While the coverage is comprehensive, it is not a long book. This brevity makes many of the discussions perhaps too distilled, which may annoy experts in a particular subfield and possibly gloss over some important details. That said, the author is surprisingly willing to tackle controversial subjects such as Martian oceans or the emergence of early life.
As someone who has watched astrobiology move from a rogue assembly of researchers into one of the most important drivers of terrestrial and planetary exploration, this book reflects the coming of age of astrobiology and addresses a real need for a crash course in all of science. Graduate students should tuck this under their arm as they head to another seminar on chemoautolithotrophy or exoplanet transmission spectroscopy knowing they can quickly refresh their memories if the talk veers into unexpected territory.
John C. Armstrong is an Associate Professor of Physics at Weber State University and collaborator with the NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL) and Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS).