Abstract
Astrobiology, like many (but not all) sciences, must take into account questions of the “Why?”, “Where?”, “How?” and “When?” type. In this introductory chapter, we explain why, in this book, we will only consider two of these questions that are, moreover, deeply interrelated. Chronology is by definition related to the “when?” question but as soon as we are interested in the history of Earth or the history of life, it is impossible to treat these questions and their answers without explicit references to the “how?” questions. We also present in this chapter the genesis and the aim of the book.
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Notes
The game consists in starting from a point A with N frogs you have to put on a wheelbarrow, and to reach a point B as quickly as possible with all the frogs still on the wheelbarrow. The story goes that you never reach the finish of the race because you spend all your time looking for frogs which, one after one, (and sometimes all together), jump outside the wheelbarrow.
References
Klein, E. and Spiro, M.: 1996, Le temps et sa flèche. Champs-Flammarion (Paris)
Mayr E. (2004). What makes Biology Unique: Consideration on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, USA
Zee A. (1986) Fearful Symmetry: the Search for Beauty in Modern Physics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA
Acknowledgements
Writing a collegial paper with 25 researchers belonging to very different scientific fields is a challenge comparable to a “frog race”Footnote 1. As we finally, all together, reach the finish, the editors would really like to thank all the authors who accepted to participate in this adventure and who accepted to stay on the “chronology wheelbarrow” whatever the difficulties could have been and the time needed to reach the goal.
We would also like to warmly thank the ≪Château Monlot Capet≫, St Emilion, France http://www.belair-monlot.com/anglais/bienvenue.htm and the ≪Fondation Antoine d’Abbadie≫ of the French Academy of Sciences, Hendaye, France http://www.academie-sciences.fr/Abbadia.htm for their kind hospitality during the May and December 2004 ≪chronology workshops≫. The vivid and controversial ideas discussed during these workshops were at the origin of this review.
Finally we are very grateful to Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and especially to the Aquitaine and Limousin Delegation, to Centre National d’Etude Spatiale (CNES), to the GDR (Groupement de Recherche) Exobio, to the Conseil Régional d’Aquitaine, to the Université Bordeaux 1 and to the Observatoire Aquitain des Sciences de l’Univers, near Bordeaux, for their financial support in the course of this project.
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Each chapter (from the “chronometers” chapter 2 to the final “conclusions” of chapter 9) has been submitted to a very severe internal refereeing, each author having read many, if not all, contributions to make comments, criticisms and advice. As a general rule these comments/remarks were discussed amongst the authors and were included in the original text. Ideally, all the authors could have signed together all the contributions but we have preferred to “render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” and the specialist who first wrote it signed each subchapter. For further information on the contributing authors, please refer to ‚CVs’, included at the end of this volume. All subchapters devoted to the same general field have been gathered together as a chapter under a general title. Consequently, each chapter is alphabetically co-signed by all the authors of the subchapters, and the first author is the coordinator who supervised its homogeneity and completeness. In all cases, each author did his (or her) best to give to the reader the most accurate and recent data, along with the evidence, but also assumptions, on which the data is founded and, when necessary, the caution required for its interpretation. A glossary of terminology used in all chapters is availableat the end of this volume.