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Space Hazards: A Comprehensive Guide to Asteroids, Solar Flares, Space Junk, and Other Cosmic Threats to Life on Earth
240 pages, Hardcover
Published December 9, 2025
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November 15, 2025
Before the heat death of the universe, or whatever's in store for everything, the sun will kill us off. And before that there are multiples of risk factors we have to consider – and they all come from space. This book starts off with the life cycle of the sun and how the Goldilocks zone allowing liquid water and therefore life is only temporary – we have about four billion years to take advantage of it left. We then look at what the sun throws at us – solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and charged dumps of magnetised matter that could knock a lot of our technology out.
After a brief diversion to space junk it's to other things that might crashland on us – asteroids, near-Earth comets and meteors. We've had previous with those things, of course – from the dinosaurs getting wiped out to some people being in bed and nearly being hit by them. After that it's to the even more esoteric and unthinkable fates, such as Earth hitting another planet, and even what happens when the Milky Way collides with its neighbouring galaxy, as it will do.
This was probably what I wanted from such a book, but it didn't present itself perfectly well. There's some hard science here, and the approach to make it universally understandable doesn't quite work. I felt the chattiness, the foreshadowing, the rhetorical questions and so on were misplaced, not really in the right place on these pages to ensure we understood it all, and therefore worth dispensing with. The way the solar cycle was defined only after many mentions that didn't clarify it wasn't great.
Mind, to make all this accessible for the stereotypical reader on the stereotypical omnibus would be a major undertaking, and this isn't too far off all told. It's always going to be awkward, turning this amount of information into a successful book appealing to the reader who never expected to be reading about such matters. The amount of wonderful images goes a long way to making it that – this isn't a dense read. All told, it's probably my nitpicking that makes me think there was a better book possible from these contents, given a re-edit here and a tweak there. Like I say, it delivered what I expected, and I know of no alternative. Four stars then, for what to some will be an unfortunate balance of the scintillating science and the doom and gloom of all our likely futures thrown together.
After a brief diversion to space junk it's to other things that might crashland on us – asteroids, near-Earth comets and meteors. We've had previous with those things, of course – from the dinosaurs getting wiped out to some people being in bed and nearly being hit by them. After that it's to the even more esoteric and unthinkable fates, such as Earth hitting another planet, and even what happens when the Milky Way collides with its neighbouring galaxy, as it will do.
This was probably what I wanted from such a book, but it didn't present itself perfectly well. There's some hard science here, and the approach to make it universally understandable doesn't quite work. I felt the chattiness, the foreshadowing, the rhetorical questions and so on were misplaced, not really in the right place on these pages to ensure we understood it all, and therefore worth dispensing with. The way the solar cycle was defined only after many mentions that didn't clarify it wasn't great.
Mind, to make all this accessible for the stereotypical reader on the stereotypical omnibus would be a major undertaking, and this isn't too far off all told. It's always going to be awkward, turning this amount of information into a successful book appealing to the reader who never expected to be reading about such matters. The amount of wonderful images goes a long way to making it that – this isn't a dense read. All told, it's probably my nitpicking that makes me think there was a better book possible from these contents, given a re-edit here and a tweak there. Like I say, it delivered what I expected, and I know of no alternative. Four stars then, for what to some will be an unfortunate balance of the scintillating science and the doom and gloom of all our likely futures thrown together.
Displaying 1 of 1 review