Will spreading across the solar system turn us into a new species?

That's this week on Planetary Radio's book club edition.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

Change a species environment, change the availability of the resources it needs to survive,

its challenges and threats, and that species will adapt as best it can.

Charles Darwin saw the truth of this nearly 200 years ago as he

voyaged on HMS Beagle, and he expected humans to evolve in the face of the same pressures.

Caleb Scharf believes becoming a space-faring species, one that lives on and between other worlds will inevitably do

the same to us or our descendants his book about this topic is the giant leap

why space is the next frontier in the evolution of life published just last year

by the way this is a theme will return to soon in the Planetary Society

Book Club, part of our rich and very active online member community. That's where I welcomed Caleb

in February of 2026. Here's our great conversation.

Caleb, thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure to be here.

And a pleasure to have read your book as well, which I hope a lot of the folks who have joined us live have already done.

If you have not, we're going to go through a fair amount of the basics

of what Caleb covers in this galaxy encompassing book. Let me tell you a little bit about

our guest. Caleb Sharf works in the fields of exoplanetary science and astrobiology. He writes

extensively about science for folks like you and me. He received the 2022 Carl Sagan Medal while serving as director of astrobiology at Columbia University.

He's now the senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA's Ames Research Center, which has been such a center of astrobiology for so many years.

I've enjoyed his contributions to one of my three favorite magazines, Scientific American.

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