Light of the Stars tells the sto­ry of human­i­ty’s com­ing of age as we awak­en to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of life on oth­er worlds and their sud­den rel­e­vance to our fate on Earth. Astro­physi­cist Adam Frank traces the ques­tion of alien life and intel­li­gence from the ancient Greeks to the lead­ing thinkers of our own time, and shows how we as a civ­i­liza­tion can only hope to sur­vive cli­mate change if we rec­og­nize what sci­ence has recent­ly dis­cov­ered: that we are just one of ten bil­lion tril­lion plan­ets in the Uni­verse, and it’s high­ly like­ly that many of those plan­ets host­ed tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced alien civ­i­liza­tions. What’s more, each of those civ­i­liza­tions must have faced the same chal­lenge of civ­i­liza­tion-dri­ven cli­mate change. Thrilling sci­ence at the grand­est of scales, Light of the Stars explores what may be the largest ques­tion of all: What can the like­ly pres­ence of life on oth­er worlds tell us about our own fate?