The Search for Aliens: A Rough Guide to Life on Other Worlds is a scientific journey that reaches into our profoundest philosophical and religious desire for answers — and perhaps, also into our deepest dreads. Exobiology, a subject that once seemed nothing more than the realm of science fiction fantasies, is now a thriving professional branch of science, driven by new and startling discoveries on Earth as well as by a mass of new data from space probes. Highly acclaimed popular science writer Piers Bizony provides the first vivid and completely accessible guide to the most exciting field of modern science: the search for aliens. It begins with a brief history of the search for extraterrestrials and what "life" consists of scientifically. All the latest research projects are identified, located, and described, from radio dishes seeking out intelligent alien signals to deep oceanic research seeking links between terrestrial organisms and the broader cosmos. This Rough Guide also explores the idea of Panspermia, the notion that asteroids and comets brought biological building blocks to the early earth Is there any living thing out there? We still don"t know, but this book explains why we may be closer than ever to finding out.