Taxi from Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe

Cockell, Charles S.

ISBN 10: 0674297229 / ISBN 13: 9780674297227

Published by Harvard University Press, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 11-19-2025_MV_1.5M_H0000WVR

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Taxi from Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674297229
• ISBN 13: 9780674297227
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

“Timely…Cockell makes us consider a gamut of new possibilities that boggle the mind.”
―Bruce Dorminey, Forbes

“Taxi from Another Planet conveys an array of ideas―all fascinating, and some profound―with a light touch and utter clarity. Accessible to anyone curious about the cosmos.”―Martin Rees, coauthor of The End of Astronauts

“Entertaining and informative in equal measure.”―Morgan Hollis, Nature Astronomy

If you’ve ever sat in the back seat of a taxi, you know that cabbies like to talk. Sports or politics, your job or theirs, taxi drivers are fine conversationalists on just about any topic. And when the passenger is astrobiologist Charles Cockell, that topic is usually space and what, if anything, lives out there.

Inspired by conversations with drivers all over the world, Taxi from Another Planet tackles the questions that everyday people have about the cosmos and our place in it. Will we understand aliens? What if there isn’t life out in the universe? Is Mars our Plan B? And why is the government spending tax dollars on space programs anyway? Each essay in this genial collection takes questions like these as a starting point on the way to a range of insightful, even poignant, observations. Cockell delves into debates over the inevitability of life and looks to both human history and scientific knowledge to consider what first contact will be like and what we can expect from spacefaring societies. He also offers a forceful argument for the sympathies between space exploration and environmentalism.

A shrewd and entertaining foray into the most fundamental mysteries, Taxi from Another Planet brings together the wisdom of scientific experts and their fellow citizens of Earth, the better to understand how life might unfold elsewhere.

About the Author

Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, where he founded the UK Centre for Astrobiology. He formerly worked at NASA, the British Antarctic Survey, and the Open University. He has studied microbial life in many of Earth's extreme environments and published a variety of popular and academic books about life in the universe and the exploration of space.