Frontiers of Time

by Time-Life Books

Book Overview

Excellent condition. No blemishes, highlights or damage to pagers or cover. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809469294
• ISBN13: 9780809469291
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Time Life Medical
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Age Range: 11 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 6 and higher

Customer Reviews

The End of Everything as of 1991

This book starts quietly with the mythical birth and death of the universe according to the 32,000 verses of the "Vishnu Purana," which in many ways predict the evolution of our sun to a red giant, its development of a planetary nebula, and its long, slow decline into darkness as a white dwarf. The Earth ends in fire, then ice as a consequence of our sun's evolution. According to "Frontiers of Time," humanity might find a temporary home on Mars while the sun is in its red-giant phase. Ultimately we could inhabit the Oort Cloud which has a surface area equivalent to 100 million planets the size of Earth, if Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson turn out to be true prophets. In the frozen domain of the comets, the sun would shine only a little more brightly than the other stars. The authors spend a few pages discussing dangers we face while still on Earth. Comet and meteor strikes are included of course, although this book is just a bit too old to talk about the Chicxulub impact crater, which appears to be exactly the right age and the right size to have terminated most of the life on Earth, sixty-five million years ago. However, mention is made of the iridium layer and the fact that a comet or meteor impact must have caused the extinctions at the K-T boundary.Some play is also given to the Milankovitch theory of climate change, and the likelihood of another ice age some time soon.NOTE: good news from the NASA website--no Northern Hemisphere summer insolation declines sufficient to cause an ice age are expected for the next 100,000 years.What will happen five billion years from now when our sun exhausts its central store of hydrogen? The authors believe that life on Earth will have long since vanished as the greenhouse effect turns our planet into another stifling, waterless Venus. The sun itself will dwindle down to a long life as a white dwarf, then ultimately cool down to a small, long-forgotten cinder.Now we've arrived at the heart of "Frontiers of Time"--the grand finale of our universe as all the stars go out and the galaxies themselves evaporate, leaving behind little more than massive black holes. Not only that--"a trillion trillion years from now, gravitational radiation will have brought all orbital motion in the universe to a halt." The authors consider three alternative fates for the universe: open and expanding like crazy; open, but slowing down; and closed (be sure to check out the 'Americans for a Closed Universe' web site. It's a hoot). Current observations say that there is not enough matter in the universe to reverse the expansion and head us towards a 'Big Crunch.' There certainly isn't enough visible matter, but there is evidence of matter that we can't see, i.e. the so-called 'dark matter.'This book shows its age (date of publication: 1991) in its discussion of dark matter, and in the absence of any discussion of 'dark energy'(which seems to be pushing galaxies apart even faster into the farthest reaches of the universe.)