In which I bring down Phil Plait! Muahahaha!

Just kidding. I liked Death from the Skies a lot better than I liked Supersense, which sucked the moon from the sky (which is another way that the world can end! Yay!). Of course, I liked ear surgery better than Supersense, so take that for what it is worth.

Phil Plait's book is perhaps the bloodiest book ever written. Seriously. By my count, Plait killed over 61.2 billion people by the end of the book (6.8 billion in each of nine chapters).

As you might have guessed, Death from the Skies is one cataclysmic book, and Plait is at all points on the verge of giving his more panicsome (it should be a word) readers aneurisms (the word should be spelled that way). You've probably read the book before, but basically, he lists all the immense forces in the universe that could cook our collective goose. Black holes are bad in many ways, whether they spaghettify, er, spaghettificate (ahem), suck you unpleasantly hard or blast you with radiation--you either vanish into an inaccessible part of the cosmos or get flash-fried like a chicken.

By lucky happenstance, I am still listening to Richard Pogge's course, "Life in the Universe," and there is a lot of intersection between the the book and the podcast. All the things that Pogge says can't happen to a planet if we want to find life, Plait makes happen to us. If Pogge wants to protect us from UV and gamma rays, Plait wants to destroy our atmosphere. If Pogge wants to find a planet in the habitable zone of a main sequence star, Plait wants to see what happens if you nudge the planet in just a little closer, and, oh, what the hell, make it a red supergiant.

My favorite chapter was the last one, where Plait tries to give a sense of deep time, an unimaginably remote point in the future when the matter in the universe becomes so diffuse, when all the protons have decayed, and the universe is almost perfectly cold. It is the temporal equivalent to the opening of that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe: "Space is big. Really big, You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..." Unfortunately, my little lizard brain has a hard time processing the depths of deep time, so we must resort to insane concepts like 10^1000 years: eons upon eons to the power of eons!

Oh, happy 2010, Eastern Time Zone.

Actually, my favorite bits were the scenarios he sketches out at the beginning of each chapter. That's what I'm talking about. For instance, his description of a black hole deforming the solar system as it hurtles toward us is majestically horrifying! Little details, like the extra shadows as an earth-sterilizing asteroid collides with the atmosphere, much to the chagrin of humanity, who was using the atmosphere at the time. There were kernels of decent sci-fi stories in those scenarios, and if I were to do a movie adaptation, that's what I would focus on. Maybe I'd do it like Pulp Fiction...a bunch of apocalypses (there is a plural for that word, Buffy fans!) that intersect and come together at the end. With lots of swearing.

I think that the ultimate message from Plait is: "Smile! We're all screwed!" This makes sense to me.

My next book is Around in Circles, about the crop circle phenomenon. It's supposed to be really good.

HJ