Habitable Planets for Man

Habitable Planets For Man is a work by Stephen Dole originally published for the US Government contractor RAND Corporation in 1964 with input from Isaac Asimov. It was republished in a posthumous second edition in 2007, as Planets for Man. The 174-page book 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, including assessments of 14 stars within 22 light years with a relatively high probability of having habitable planets (a collective probability of 43%). Writing in a Scientific American blog in 2011, Caleb Scharf called it "extraordinarily detailed and prescient".