RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

. Originally 158 pages, it was republished in a posthumous second edition in 2007, as ''Planets for Man''. The revised edition, 174 pages, contains a detailed scientific study on the nature of worlds that may support life in the universe, the probability of their existence, and ways of finding them. It includes assessments of 14 stars within 22

light year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distance, astronomical distances and is equal to exactly , which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by t ...

s with a relatively high probability of having habitable planets (a collective probability of 43%). Writing in a ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' blog in 2011, Caleb Scharf called it "extraordinarily detailed and prescient".

Publication data

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External links

Official RAND Corporation Site

References

{{reflist 1964 non-fiction books 2007 non-fiction books Astronomy books