Alien Encounter

Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a professor at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and an adjunct professor at Arizona State University and Washington State University. He is interested in all aspects of astrobiology, but particularly whether other planets and moons inside and outside our Solar System could serve as a potential habitat for life. He received the Friedrich-Wilhelm Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation for extraordinary achievements in theoretical biology  in 2010.  He is best known for his publications on extraterrestrial life, which span nearly 200 scientific articles and several books such as Cosmic Biology: How Life Could Evolve on other Worlds (2011),  Megacatastrophes! Nine Strange Ways the World Could End (2012),  The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia (2016) and The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds (2017), as well as three editions of Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints (2004,2008 and 2018).

From the book reviews: "The main theme of this book is the need to keep an open mind regarding the possibilities for diverse forms of life in the Solar System and beyond. ... the appendix provides a useful discussion of a number of important astrobiological concepts, and will be of value to students and others wishing to explore those ideas further. ... a lot of food for thought, and well worth reading." (Ian Crawford, The Observatory, Vol. 134 (1243), December, 2014)

• Part I: The Novel.- Alien Encounter.- Part II: The Science Behind the Fiction.