Mars

We Are Not Alone: Why We Have Already Found Extraterrestrial Life

We Are Not Alone boldly argues that extraterrestrial life is astrobiological fact. Far from existing light-years away in the outer reaches of space, it's on our very doorstep. For persuasive evidence of microbial life, we need look no further than our celestial neighbour, Mars. Expertly probing the latest scientific research, this fascinating book provides compelling reasons to believe that extraterrestrial life is rife both in the Solar System and beyond.

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must

"For our generation and many that will follow, Mars is the New World," writes Zubrin. This book went to press serendipitously, just as NASA was making its startling if heavily-qualified announcement that simple life may have once existed on the fourth rock from the sun. Zubrin doesn't spend an enormous amount of time arguing why Mars exploration is desirable -- we all want astronauts to go there, don't we? -- but rather devotes the bulk of this book explaining how it can happen on a sensible, bare-bones budget of $20-30 billion and a "travel light and live off the land" philosophy.

Since the beginning of human history Mars has been an alluring dream—the stuff of legends, gods, and mystery. The planet most like ours, it has still been thought impossible to reach, let alone explore and inhabit.

Now with the advent of a revolutionary new plan, all this has changed. Leading space exploration authority Robert Zubrin has crafted a daring new blueprint, Mars Direct, presented here with illustrations, photographs, and engaging anecdotes.

The Case for Mars is not a vision for the far future or one that will cost us impossible billions. It explains step-by-step how we can use present-day technology to send humans to Mars within ten years; actually produce fuel and oxygen on the planet's surface with Martian natural resources; how we can build bases and settlements; and how we can one day "terraform" Mars—a process that can alter the atmosphere of planets and pave the way for sustainable life.

How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet

Thinking about moving to mars?

Well, why not? Mars, after all, is the planet that holds the greatest promise for human colonization. But why speculate about the possibilities when you can get the real scientific scoop from someone who’s been happily living and working there for years? Straight from the not-so-distant future, this intrepid pioneer’s tips for physical, financial, and social survival on the Red Planet cover:

• How to get to Mars (Cycling spacecraft offer cheap rides, but the smell is not for everyone.)
• Choosing a spacesuit (The old-fashioned but reliable pneumatic Neil Armstrong style versus the sleek new—but anatomically unforgiving—elastic “skinsuit.”)
• Selecting a habitat (Just like on Earth: location, location, location.)
• Finding a job that pays well and doesn’t kill you (This is not a metaphor on Mars.)
• How to meet the opposite sex (Master more than forty Mars-centric pickup lines.)

With more than twenty original illustrations by Michael Carroll, Robert Murray, and other renowned space artists, How to Live on Mars seamlessly blends humor and real science, and is a practical and exhilarating guide to life on our first extraterrestrial home.

A Traveler's Guide to Mars

A Traveler's Guide to Mars revitalizes the Red Planet, leaving readers with the urge to don a spacesuit and take a long trip. With the look and heft of a guide to someplace you might actually go, the book presents Mars as a place of canyons and volcanoes, mesas, and barren plains, not that dissimilar from parts of Earth. Author William K. Hartmann, who participated in the Mars Global Surveyor mission, uses all the photos and data collected by scientists in decades of research to give a thorough, yet not boring, overview of the planet. The most exciting stuff is about water--whether it ever flowed on Mars, where it went, why it's hard to find. Beyond that, there are the rocks, dust, and weather to talk about, and Mars has lots of all three. Sidebars, maps, and chronologies help keep the regions and geology of Mars organized. Hartmann never forgets he's writing for the lay reader, and his style is personable and clear. When answering claims of NASA cover-ups, ancient civilizations, and hidden structures on Mars, he calmly lays out the facts and pictures, urging readers to simply examine the evidence. Hartmann offers a tourist's-eye view of one of our most intriguing planetary neighbors and does more to polish NASA's tarnished image than a thousand press releases. --Therese Littleton

Two events will make the summer of 2003 a remarkable one for amateur astronomers. By late August, Mars will come within 34 million miles of Earth, appearing six times larger and shining 85 times brighter than usual-"the most striking and spectacular Mars apparition in tens of thousands of years" (The New York Times). And William K. Hartmann, co-author of The Grand Tour, Out of the Cradle, and The History of Earth, is publishing A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO MARS.

Conceived and created like a real Baedecker-factual, accessible, heavily illustrated, in a carry-around size-A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO MARS brings together all the astonishing information scientists have recently learned about Mars, and conveys it in the engaging, lively style that made Dr. Hartmann the first-ever winner of the Carl Sagan Medal for public communication of planetary science. Taken around the planet like tourists, readers will discover mysterious dry riverbeds, the largest volcano in the solar system (three times higher than Mount Everest), a possible ancient sea floor, giant impact craters, "the face on Mars," and other wonders.

Throughout is an Extraordinary selection of photographs, maps, and paintings, including images from Mariner 9 and the Viking explorations, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the ongoing Mars Global Surveyor mission. Four gatefolds show the latest topographic maps of the entire Martian surface. Sidebars advise readers on what to wear and landing procedures. In addition, Hartmann's "My Martian Chronicles" spotlight his life and times as a planetary scientist.

Two events will make the summer of 2003 a remarkable one for amateur astronomers. By late August, Mars will come within 34 million miles of Earth, appearing six times larger and shining 85 times brighter than usual--the most striking and spectacular Mars apparition in tens of thousands of years (The New York Times). And William K. Hartmann, co-author of The Grand Tour, Out of the Cradle, and The History of Earth, is publishing A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO MARS.

Conceived and created like a real Baedecker-factual, accessible, heavily illustrated, in a carry-around size--A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO MARS brings together all the astonishing information scientists have recently learned about Mars, and conveys it in the engaging, lively style that made Dr. Hartmann the first-ever winner of the Carl Sagan Medal for public communication of planetary science. Taken around the planet like tourists, readers will discover mysterious dry riverbeds, the largest volcano in the solar system (three times higher than Mount Everest), a possible ancient sea floor, giant impact craters, the face on Mars, and other wonders.

Throughout is an Extraordinary selection of photographs, maps, and paintings, including images from Mariner 9 and the Viking explorations, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the ongoing Mars Global Surveyor mission. Four gatefolds show the latest topographic maps of the entire Martian surface. Sidebars advise readers on what to wear and landing procedures. In addition, Hartmann's My Martian Chronicles spotlight his life and times as a planetary scientist.

The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (5th Edition)

For many years Richard Hoagland alone hypothesized that sentient beings spent time on Mars millions of ye ars ago assembling behemoth structures whose ruins are still seen today. Here Hoagland redefines the solar system as a different place than NASA has presented. The book includes a new preface covering the Mars Global Surveyor photos and reactions of NASA.

Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization

Humans are not native to the Earth. So posits astronautical engineer Bob Zubrin in the opening of Entering Space. We're native to just a small sliver of it, the spot where our species originated in tropical Kenya. We set out from that paradise about 50,000 years ago, north into "the teeth of the Ice Age," and all the ground we've gained since then has been thanks to our tenacity and our tools.

Zubrin reasons that it's time we cover a little more ground. Written with a boyish enthusiasm and formidable techie know-how, Entering Space urges us to realize "the feasibility, the necessity, and the promise" of becoming a space-faring civilization, of colonizing our own solar system and beyond. And Zubrin, author of the influential and widely acclaimed The Case for Mars, knows his stuff--NASA adapted his plans for near-term human exploration of Mars, and Carl Sagan gave the author no less credit: "Bob Zubrin really, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue." Entering Space plots the second and third phases of humanity's course--now that we've mastered our own planet, Zubrin says we must first look to settling our solar system (beginning with Mars) and then to the galaxy beyond.

With its practicable visions of using "iceteroids" to terraform Mars and harnessing the power of the outlying gas giants ("the solar system's Persian Gulf"), Entering Space succeeds at making the fantastic seem attainable, the stuff of science fiction, science fact. --Paul Hughes

The man celebrated as "the Christopher Columbus of Mars" brings us to the very brink of human exploration.

Using nuts-and-bolts engineering and a unique grasp of human history, Robert Zubrin takes us to the not-very-distant future, when our global society will branch out into the universe. From the current-day prospect of lunar bases and Mars settlements to the outer reaches of other galaxies, Zubrin delivers the most important and forward-looking work on space and the true possibilities of human exploration since Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Sagan himself said of Zubrin's humans-to-Mars plan, "Bob Zubrin really, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue." With Entering Space, he takes us further, into the prospect of human expansion to the outer planets of our own solar system--and beyond.

"An exhilarating and informative ride." --The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Robert Zubrin is a true engineering genius like the heroic engineers of the past." --Frederick Turner, American Enterprise

An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Unclipped dust jacket. Bibliography. References. Index. Illustrated. 328pp. Detailed and fascinating portraits of seven neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.

The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special place in the swarm of mind-brain studies. He has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of "the human mind."

The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in The Medical Detectives. Sacks's stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie.

The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thinking in Pictures gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968.

Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled. --Mary Ellen Curtin

Landscapes of Mars: A Visual Tour

Landscapes of Mars is essentially a picture book that provides a visual tour of Mars. All the major regions and topographical features will be shown and supplemented with chapter introductions and extended captions. In a way, think of it as a visual tourist guide. Other topics covered are Martian uplands on the order of the elevation of Mt. Everest, Giant volcanoes and a rift system, the Grand Canyon of Mars, craters and the absence of craters over large regions (erosion), and wind shadows around craters, sand dunes, and dust devils.

The book includes discussions on the search for water (braided channels, seepage, sedimentary layering, etc.) as well as on the Viking mission search for life, Mars meteorite fossil bacteria controversy, and planetary protection in future missions. The book concludes with an exciting gallery of the best 3D images of Mars making the book a perfect tool for understanding Mars and its place in the solar system.

Nothing in This Book Is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are

This ambitious book is a personal psycho-spiritual journey, a theorization on the meaning of the monuments of Mars, a guidebook for transcending present three-dimensional limitations, and an account of our function within the grand celestial battle between internal and external knowledge. The newly revised and expanded edition of this cult classic features photos and illustrations throughout, and adds the Lucifer Rebellion, the solar storm, and the final three breaths of the merkaba meditation. The author emphasizes the importance of meditation for promoting the understanding of and connection to the metaphysical. "... proceeds to thread together every New Age belief and conspiracy theory into a grand unified field theory of kookiness." — Wired

The Martian Codex: More Reflections from Mars

In this provocative book, The Cydonia Codex authors George J. Haas and William R. Saunders use archaeological research discoveries and photographs from NASA and other space programs to document the uncanny similarities between Martian and now-extinct Earth cultures. The Martian Codex begins with a review of the thirty-year history of documenting the famous “Face on Mars” landform from NASA’s first photographs in 1976 to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE shots in 2007. Detailed analysis shows it as a split-faced structure that precisely resembles a set of masks from a temple in Cerros, Mexico.

Part two provides additional examples of two-faced and composite structures all over the red planet. Haas and Saunders explore a series of recurring motifs by providing side-by-side views of the Martian geoglyphs with their terrestrial pre-Columbian counterparts. The results substantiate a commonality between two worlds in that both depict specific gods and characters from the creation mythology of the Mayan people, as recorded in the sacred Popol Vuh. This fact-based book represents the most persuasive argument yet that extraterrestrials may indeed have appeared on Earth during an earlier era.