Reddit mentions of How to Find a Habitable Planet (Science Essentials)

How to Find a Habitable Planet

Rare Earth (somebody else already linked to it here)

Origins of Life - an outstanding 24-lecture Teaching Company course. I can't say enough about this... it was great. The audio version is fine and the course is on sale right now ($35 instead of the regular $130). Or Pirate B... er, the library... if $35 would break the bank.

If FD want to adhere to the science, it seems likely that while microscopic life may be ubitquitous on planets wihin habitable zones, macroscopic life like Earth's may be very rare. Common M-class habitable worlds may be tidally locked storm-worlds, rarer O,B,A and F class stars may leave the main sequence before their Cambrian explosions, and the limited number of terrestrial, tectonically active worlds in non-eccentric, continuously habitable orbits around G and K class stars of the right age (4-5.5 B years for macroscopic life on Earth, til our own runaway greenhouse), and that haven't been sterilized by cometary impact or nearby supernova, may severely limit independent origins for macroscopic life. See Rare Earth, How to Find a Habitable Plant, Lucky Planet, and Where is Everybody for further constraints.

Hence most of the macroscopic life found on HZ worlds in human space may be seeded during terraforming operations. Inhabited Earth-like planets may mostly have Earth creatures, borrowed from the 101 wild animals of Zoo Tycoon, but also the domesticated animals humans bring everywhere they settle.

Truly alien macroscopic plant and wildlife may await till peace accords with Thargoids allow us to land on their own thargaformed worlds.

You're most welcome. When I was looking for the links on Amazon, I came across this, which one reviewer says is a rebuttal of several of Rare Earth's points:

How to Find a Habitable Planet

I've added it to my reading list. It definitely is a pleasurable hobby; we live in exciting times with all of the exoplanet discoveries.

Well, in his 2010 book, James Kasting (the leading researcher on the habitability of extrasolar planets) explicitly says that he's far more optimistic than the authors of the Rare Earth Hypothesis. Recent discoveries from Kepler have shown that the rare earth hypothesis probably doesn't hold (these are discoveries that the authors of the hypothesis did not know at the time they wrote the book). Even if you must have a star with the sun's lifetime, and a planet of the Earth's mass in the habitable zone (a notion that Kasting disputes - he argues that planets around red dwarfs are not as inhospitable as they seem - the flares are worst on the lowest-mass red dwarfs, but there are still plenty of higher-mass red dwarfs), the Kepler mission has now known that we now know that MANY of these stars will have planets, and that many of these planets have potential to be earthlike.

That being said, intelligent life may still be very rare. There's still a huge step from non-life to life, and from life to intelligent life. Honestly, it's impossible to make a firm conclusion as to whether or not ELEs will help or hinder the evolution of life (evolution works in really unpredictable ways). One thing is this: ELEs tend to be more common early in the solar system's life than later on in the solar system's life (because the asteroid+stray meteorite density was far higher at earlier times).

PS: I've personally talked to both Kasting and one of the authors of the Rare Earth Hypothesis. The authors of the Rare Earth Hypothesis do believe that microbial life in the galaxy is common, but that intelligent life is probably very rare.

These two books were in my university library, and both are very good. They should give you some ideas if you can find them:

• Habitable Planets for Man (published 1964, so a little dated, but still worth reading)
  
• How to Find a Habitable Planet