★What forms of life might we find on other planets? Will they obey to laws and rules that we know, or will their biology be entirely different?
★Who, or what, will welcome the first explorers?

There are few doubts that the laws of physics and chemistry apply on Earth as on other planets, that a body falls with a certain acceleration of gravity and that two chemical elements can join with particular bonds even on celestial bodies orbiting around an alien star. But we do not have the same certainty for biology. Even with different declinations, will we always have prey and predators? Will their dynamics be the same as we observe on Earth? And the cell, the basis of life, is it really so indispensable to create bodies of increasing size? In search of universal or local laws, Marco Ferrari leads us to solitary planets where only one very simple species lives, and to others even richer than Earth, where millions of living beings form a symbiotic and holistic whole. We will explore celestial bodies where life has “stopped” at a certain point of complexity, and others where biochemistry has led to solutions completely different from those we could find even in the most remote and obscure places on our planet. To discover that, most likely, the differences in structures, skeletons, organs, senses and other things always depend on one universal process: evolution.

Marco Ferrari, biologist and journalist, has been editor and director of nature and science magazines (“Oasis”, “Terra”, “Focus Junior”, “Geo”) and head of science department at “Focus”. He started as a researcher in psychopharmacology, then moved on to journalism and science popularization. He has written articles for daily, weekly and monthly newspapers, edited encyclopedias and documentaries; he has translated about ten books and written as many. With Codice edizioni he published L’evoluzione è ovunque. Vedere il mondo con gli occhi di Darwin (2015)