If you watch the daily science news, or just observe the world around you, you’ll see examples of the kinds of scenarios that my biologist colleagues describe in this chapter—mild examples, thus far, fortunately; not catastrophic examples. A recent one is the amazing jump of a lethal virus from plants to honeybees, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2014/01/31/suspicious-virus-makes-rare-cross-kingdom-leap-from-plants-to-honeybees; this was a far bigger jump than that from okra to corn in Interstellar, but a far less lethal pathogen. Another example is the rapid demise of tree species once dominant on the American scene: not only the American chestnut tree mentioned by Meyerowitz in Chapter 11, but the American elm tree, http://landscaping.about.com/cs/treesshrubs/a/american_elms.htm, and the giant pine trees around my cabin on Palomar Mountain, near the 200-inch telescope.
The cycling of oxygen between the breathable oxygen molecule O2, and carbon dioxide CO2, and also (more slowly) other forms, is called the Earth’s “oxygen cycle.” Google it. The cycling of carbon between CO2 in the atmosphere, plants (dead and alive), and also (much more slowly) other forms such as coal, oil, and kerogen, is called the “carbon cycle.” Google it, too. Obviously these cycles are coupled; they influence each other. They are the foundation for Chapter 13.
Exoplanets (planets beyond our solar system) are being discovered at a furious pace. Nearly complete catalogs, updated daily, are at http://exoplanet.eu and http://exoplanets.org. A catalog of exoplanets that could be habitable is at http://phl.upr.edu/hec. For the human side and history of the search for exoplanets and life beyond the solar system, see Mirror Earth: The Search for Our Planet’s Twin (Lemonick 2012) and Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars (Billings 2013); for technical and scientific details, see The Exoplanet Handbook (Perryman 2011). Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Shostak 2009) is an excellent description of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) via radio signals from beyond Earth and by other methods.
For information about technologies that we humans could pursue in our quest for interstellar travel, I suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel and http://fourthmillenniumfoundation.org. The astronaut Mae Jemmison is spearheading a quest to send humans beyond the solar system in the next century; see http://100yss.org. A lot of nonsense is written about interstellar travel via warp drives and wormholes. The technology of this century and likely the next few is incapable of any realistic effort in this direction, unless some far more advanced civilization provides us with the necessary spacetime warps, as in Interstellar. So don’t waste your time reading articles and claims about us humans producing strong enough warps for interstellar travel in your lifetime or that of your great-grandchildren.
For greater detail on wormholes, I especially recommend Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking (Visser 1995), despite its being nearly twenty years old. I also recommend the last chapter of Black Holes & Time Warps (Thorne 1994), Chapter 9 of Time Travel and Warp Drives (Everett and Roman 2012), and Chapter 8 of Black Holes, Wormholes, and Time Machines (Al-Khalili 2012). For an up-to-date discussion of the exotic matter required to hold a wormhole open, see Chapter 11 of Time Travel and Warp Drives (Everett and Roman 2012).
Paul Franklin’s team and I give much greater detail about our work on wormhole visualization in one or more articles that we plan to make available on the web at http://arxiv.org/find/gr-qc.
For up-to-date information about LIGO and the search for gravitational waves, see the website of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, http://www.ligo.org, especially the “News” and “Magazine” sections; also the LIGO Laboratory’s website http://www.ligo.caltech.edu, and also Kai Staats’s 2014 movie at http://www.space.com/25489-ligo-a-passion-for-understanding-complete-film.html. On the web you can also find a number of pedagogical lectures by me about gravitational waves and the warped side of the universe, for example my three “Pauli Lectures” at http://www.multimedia.ethz.ch/speakers/pauli/2011, which should be watched in the opposite order to their listing (that is, from the bottom, upward); and at a moderately technical level, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzrlr3b5aO8. For movies of black-hole collisions and the gravitational waves they emit, based on the SXS team’s simulations, see http://www.blackholes.org/explore2.html.
There are no up-to-date books about gravitational waves for the general reader, but I do recommend Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time (Bartusiak 2000), which is not extremely out of date. For the history of research on gravitational waves from Einstein onward, see Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves (Kennefick 2007).
In this chapter I make a large number of claims about Miller’s planet: its orbit, its rotation (it always keeps the same face toward Gargantua except for rocking), Gargantua’s tidal forces that deform it and make it rock; and Gargantua’s whirl of space that it experiences and how the whirl influences inertia, centrifugal forces, and the speed-of-light speed limit. These claims are all supported by Einstein’s relativistic laws of physics, his general relativity. I don’t know of any books or articles or lectures for nonspecialists that discuss and explain these things, for a planet orbiting close to a spinning black hole, except my Chapter 17. Readers at the advanced undergraduate level may try to check my claims using concepts and equations in Hartle’s textbook, Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Relativity (Hartle 2003).
The questions I raise in the section “Past History of Miller’s Planet” do not require much relativistic physics. They can be answered almost entirely with Newton’s laws of physics, and the best places to seek relevant information are books and websites that deal with geophysics or the physics of planets and their moons.
For a description of Bill Press’s discovery that black holes can vibrate and Saul Teukolsky’s deduction of the equations that govern those vibrations, see pp. 295–299 of Black Holes & Time Warps (Thorne 1994). The technical article about black-hole vibrations and their ringdown that underlies both Figure 18.1 and Romilly’s data set is Yang et al. (2013) by Huan Yang, Aaron Zimmerman, and their colleagues.