The center of this book is an introduction to the state of modern space science. It consists of a whistle-stop tour of the Solar System, mixing history of its exploration with the current scientific understanding of its component parts. This layer is good, which is good, seeing as how it is most of the book. At worst, it is ‘Carl Sagan at home’ with the blending between science, history, personal reflection, and expressions of awe, and as such shares the same flaws with the material that sounds sagacious and quotes great but withers under scrutiny. But the store is out of more Cosmos, anyway, so this is welcome. There is nothing radical here, but there need not be.

The framing mechanism on this is Charles Darwin’s time on the Beagle, the inciting incident for his publishing the Theory of Evolution. The clever choice here is that the device is both form and metaphor. Darwin’s story acts as representative for the general act of human exploration and discovery over the ages, and specifically not only in an Age of Exploration or Colonization sense but in the impressive way that humans have made everything their ecological niche. But it is also intended literally.

The history of life in whole mirrors that of humans, in the sense that life does the meme and desires its own propagation. The story of humans exploiting the world is only a footnote to the story of life exploiting the world. Evolution is fitness-seeking into every possible fit. This, then, is the framing device to the framing device. Or at least the marketing.

The eponymous great leap, customarily referred to as the dispersal, is then human expanse into space, maybe onto other planets but off this one at some rate. Human progress into space is what life does. Therefore, it is necessary and proper to live extra-terrestrially.

The teleology light is now lit.

Other than its Dawkins-y strong adaptation view of evolution, my problem here is that a lung is not an airplane. You can put human social and cultural events into evolutionary terms. That is the whole point of the idea of a meme. You can, I think, squeeze it through in claiming technology use as subsidiary to culture. But then why space travel? Nuclear weapons are as much an accomplishment, but the argument is not self-immolation.

This then is the dual meaning to the dispersal. Extra-terrestrial living means the expansion of life, but it also means the expansion of the definition of humanity. This in itself provides the brake on the more dystopian visions. The ‘company town’ fear is not biologically sustainable as a concept.

What the author is driving towards is the soft singularity. The term, or something like transhumanism, never is invoked (that I noted), but something like the vision of Mars here is not the Red/Blue/Green split as much as Techno, even so far as to be something where it is more akin to telepresence for humans, but in a manner that the systems that are there exceed any contemporary understanding of human or robot or AI, to the point that it is a new life form.

I think that this book is mis-sold as being about extra-planetary expansion. It ultimately affirms that. It acknowledges the challenges as serious, non-trivial, and potentially unsolvable, calling out the usual suspects of justification as incorrect (rocks hit Mars, too). It just gets excited about the prospect. The book argues that we know that we do not know. We need to be ready for all our answers to be wrong. But trying is the only way to find out what we do not know. Failure is the antithesis to get to a heretofore unimagined synthesis, one that may in fact not be space exploitation. And the author's enthusiasm is infectious.

My thanks to the author, Caleb Scharf, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Basic Books, for making the ARC available to me.