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A review by socraticgadfly
The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul C.W. Davies
5.0
Why we haven't made "contact" yet ...
The "Contact" is capitalized to riff on the Carl Sagan-based movie of Jodie Foster's.
And, Sagan, along with SETI founder Frank Drake, was the most unabashed ... and most fluffing ... booster of SETI around.
I've long held that the numerical values Drake and Sagan plugged into most of the variables in Drake's Equation weren't just "optimistic," they were ridiculous.
And, now, a serious SETItian (gotta have a whale of a pun in this review, too, eh?) agrees.
Davies says why traditional SETI ideas are so cockeyed optimistic, with detail. But not just that.
He also carefully explains how we have likely been, "Looking for aliens in all the wrong places," not too mention all the wrong ways and more.
In short, to riff on a Web term, Davies explicitly calls for SETI 2.0 to start up - now.
That said, he thinks that it's quite likely that, in our galaxy at least, no matter how strange the possibilities of alien life might be ... it just isn't there.
He even wonders if the thirst, the yen for SETI to pan out, on some people's parts, isn't almost religious. (Note 1: Given Davies' background, that could be considered ironic, hypocritical, or a bit of both. Note 2: I've thought the same, in light of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to many cosmologists' pre-dark energy lusting after the idea of a closed universe to be real.)
Anyway, this is THE book to read on why ET is not phoning home from Earth, or isn't phoning into Earth in the first place.
The "Contact" is capitalized to riff on the Carl Sagan-based movie of Jodie Foster's.
And, Sagan, along with SETI founder Frank Drake, was the most unabashed ... and most fluffing ... booster of SETI around.
I've long held that the numerical values Drake and Sagan plugged into most of the variables in Drake's Equation weren't just "optimistic," they were ridiculous.
And, now, a serious SETItian (gotta have a whale of a pun in this review, too, eh?) agrees.
Davies says why traditional SETI ideas are so cockeyed optimistic, with detail. But not just that.
He also carefully explains how we have likely been, "Looking for aliens in all the wrong places," not too mention all the wrong ways and more.
In short, to riff on a Web term, Davies explicitly calls for SETI 2.0 to start up - now.
That said, he thinks that it's quite likely that, in our galaxy at least, no matter how strange the possibilities of alien life might be ... it just isn't there.
He even wonders if the thirst, the yen for SETI to pan out, on some people's parts, isn't almost religious. (Note 1: Given Davies' background, that could be considered ironic, hypocritical, or a bit of both. Note 2: I've thought the same, in light of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to many cosmologists' pre-dark energy lusting after the idea of a closed universe to be real.)
Anyway, this is THE book to read on why ET is not phoning home from Earth, or isn't phoning into Earth in the first place.