Decade...

One Decade, a Lot of Writing

Ten years, measured in words on astrobiology, exoplanets and the cosmos in general

By Caleb A. Scharf on December 29, 2019

As the 2010s draw to a close I thought I’d reflect on some of the things I’ve written about these past ten years – ranging from books and articles to research papers.

I actually started this decade as a newbie in writing for a general audience. Back on March 24th, 2010 I kicked off my first-ever blog as a total amateur out in the wild. That was the origin point for Life, Unbounded. My first real science post there? It was on a NASA project to drill into the Antarctic Ross ice-shelf at the most unpromising sounding site of Windless Blight.

Things moved along from that point, and by July 2011 Life, Unbounded was headed over to Scientific American’s fledging blog network, where it has somehow remained. While that was going on I was also hard at work on my first pop-sci book: Gravity’s Engines which took a look at black holes as real astrophysical objects, rather than the near-mystical entities of so many stories. That gave me a chance to babble on about my own work in that area, and a particularly fascinating piece of astronomical exploration that captured a new side to a supermassive black hole that existed within a couple billion years of the Big Bang./.../