Imagine: in belated recognition of your abilities you've just received the call from NASA and are, as of today, in charge of the U.S. space program, with a budget of trillions and carte blanche to explore the universe as and how you will. OK, what next? Where do you start? Get some reading matter for the plane to Washington. Ask one of your new aides to pop out and find you a copy of Looking for Life.

As your pilot gains altitude and heads for your overnight stop in Honolulu (you'll need to be fresh for that first chat with Dubya), settle back and get reading… As a primer on the essentials of space exploration, Looking for Life couldn't be better. It begins with a discussion of the types of people we might need, and then it's down to the science.

We read of life and how we might recognise it; of how to arrange for humans to survive long spaceflights and alien planets. There's even a section on the ethics of exploration, and particularly colonisation.

Perhaps most interesting for those of us sitting on a decaying planet Earth and wondering how humanity might ever escape from it, is the section on 'The cosmic biological imperative'. Its chapters outline the sort of spacecraft we might need to embark on our exploration, how many crew, their physical and psychological needs.

What's unusual and intriguing about this book is the comparison between the space exploration of the future and the voyages undertaken by past explorers such as Cook and Magellan.

The authors are telling us that humanity has already carried out work comparable to exploring space; that we've got the people, which is a hell of a start.