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In March 1995, we had the privilege and pleasure of organizing a Symposium at UCLA on “The Origin and Evolution of the Universe”. It attracted overflow audiences from diverse elements of the Los Angeles community, including college students, faculty, researchers and members of the interested general public. The speakers then carefully prepared and extended their presentations for our 1996 publication of the First Edition of “The Origin and Evolution of the Universe”.

The subject of the original book is still as fresh and exciting as it ever has been. Now there are several compelling reasons we decided to produce a thoroughly revised second edition.

Discoveries and advances have unfolded at such a remarkable pace, exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. In 1996, supernovae had not yet been used to establish a cosmic distance scale accurate enough to determine that the Universal expansion is — surprisingly — accelerating. The remarkable detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes and neutron stars by LIGO was still decades in the future. And essentially no planets beyond our solar system were known to exist, and certainly none that were anything like our Earth. Today everything has changed.

In 1996, the authors of each chapter were already prominent researchers in their fields. Over the last two decades, their careers continued to advance and even accelerate. Today they are each an undisputed active leader in their area of scientific specialization. They are also in demand as skilled communicators of science to the wider public. They are thus ideal writers to convey the latest major developments in astronomy.

In addition, since 1996, the importance of these big themes of science to non-scientists has arguably grown even larger. Scientific research is now depending on public support for even larger amounts of funding than ever before. Many specific successful examples appear throughout the chapters in this book. Scientific results from the European Space Agency’s Planck and Newton/XMM satellites are described in Chapters 1 and 4. New exoplanet discoveries from NASA’s Kepler satellite are described in Chapter 6. And further scientific breakthroughs from the multi-national collaborations to build and operate the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as ALMA — a giant array of radio telesopes located in northern Chile — are described in Chapters 2 and 5. We are already anticipating comparable publicly-funded advances in astronomy with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2021.

One broader point should be clear to readers of this Second Edition. In the entire Universe, Earth’s biosphere remains the only home of life that we know of. Whether or not we are prepared for it, we humans have thus inherited a tremendous responsibility as Earth’s stewards.

As in 1996, many people today regard the climax of the evolution of the Universe to be life, and especially “intelligent” life. It remains an open question whether or not this will be enough. “Intelligence” makes our technology possible, but it should be much more. Are we truly “intelligent”, or only “technological”? Human intelligence notwithstanding, we often seem to be our own worst enemy. Our rapid technical advances have often not been matched by comparable improvements in our ability to get along with each other and our environment. Using our full human intelligence is our best hope for the future. Our species will have to be smarter — and act smarter. Our success or failure at solving our problems in managing our uniquely precious planet provide the sharpest test yet of real human intelligence. If we can pass this test, then we may also be able to answer the outstanding future questions explored and raised in this book.

Matthew Malkan and Benjamin Zuckerman

UCLA