Out of This World and Into the Next: A Physicist's Guide to Space Exploration

by Adriana Marais

A theoretical physicist's grand tour of how life emerged on Earth and how human civilization will begin expanding beyond our home planet.

This is a theoretical physicist’s grand tour of how life emerged on Earth and, perhaps most importantly, how human civilization will begin expanding beyond our home planet. According to Dr. Adriana Marais, living on more than one planet is an inevitability of becoming a more advanced society, but the process of getting there will provide us with the essential tools for better stewardship of our own.

Humanity has always looked up at the night sky and wondered what lies beyond our world. Now, we are on the precipice of stepping out among the stars, not just as lone astronauts or billionaire tech bros, but as a civilization. Our story is one of curiosity and an innate desire to explore and understand not only the world around us, but the world within us, and the worlds above us, from extremophiles to extraterrestrials, technosignatures to terraforming, DNA to Dyson Spheres.

In this sweeping treatise on exploration, innovation, and human ingenuity, theoretical physicist Dr. Adriana Marais seeks to answer the questions that stand at the heart of scientific What are the building blocks of life and how does life emerge? Are we alone in the universe and if so, why? How did we get here—and where are we going next?

368 pages, Hardcover

Published May 6, 2025

Reviews

[WiseB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out of This World and Into the Next explores humanity’s perennial question: what lies beyond death? The author aims to show that existence transcends the material plane, grounded in evidence from religious, philosophical, and experiential sources. The central rationale is that life is a continuum, not an end.

Key arguments presented include:
- The soul and consciousness survive physical death.
- Death is a transition, not a cessation.
- The spirit world is structured, moral, and connected to our earthly choices.
- Communication across realms is possible, offering lessons of compassion, love, and spiritual growth.
- Reincarnation provides a framework for explaining human inequality and soul progression.
- The purpose of earthly life is spiritual development through experience and challenge.
- Ethics and spiritual law guide the destiny of the soul.

The book’s final message is one of reassurance and meaning: humanity is on a continuous spiritual journey, and death is merely a passage into the next phase of existence. The takeaway for readers is to live ethically, seek growth, and nurture relationships of love and compassion, as these are the true currencies of eternal life.

[Richard Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past seevral years, I have tried to read more and learn more about the possibility/feasibility of going to other worlds and what we would encounter in terms of the environment. This book is a hard one to rate/review. On the one hand, it so chockful of information and ideas reading it only once is doing it a disservice. On the other, it is so chockful of information and ideas, it's hard to say that it was laidout in a way that most people can understand what she was intending when she wrote it. It is full of meanderings that I was lost as to where it was going. Still I enjoyed the book immensely. I borrowed this copy from the library but I think I need to purchase my own copy either as a hardback or an ebook so I may go back to it and maybe take it in more digestible chunks that I can then mull over a bit more. I have done the same with other books like Sapiens and other volumes written by Yuval Harari among others that you wnat to study and not just read. One thing, in final pages of the book in the chapter Worldshapers I got the feeling that if we did send members of our species off to other worlds we would just despoil those up as well.