Reviews for If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

The average rating for If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-26 00:00:00 Michael fleming Point a decent-sized radio antenna at any part of the sky, or just look up at it all on a cloudless night: not a trace of aliens - doesn't that strike you as odd? It struck physicist Enrico Fermi as very odd: if the laws of nature are universal, working in the same way all over the galaxy, and have produced the Earth, life (and us) here, then they should have produced Earths (and 'us') everywhere. Worse, our solar system may be more than four billion years old, but the Universe itself is more than thirteen billion - so there should have been Earths out there with their versions of us for aeons already. Yet here we are, apparently alone. This has become known as the Fermi Paradox - in Fermi's own words, 'Where is everybody?' - and the more we learn, the more mystifying it becomes: the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence programme has been running for decades now, without detecting even a single stray signal, while at the same time the latest space probes are discovering new planets by the truck-load. In fact, this isn't a full-blown paradox at all, just a flat contradiction between what, on the one hand, we believe to be the way the Universe works (its laws of nature, science as a rationale, reason itself for that matter) and, on the other, the Universe we seem to be living in. One of these must be incomplete or even wrong in some way. Perhaps the former; to give just one example, perhaps there are unknown phenomena at work, vast cataclysms which periodically sterilize the entire cosmos and set the clock of life back to zero each time - if that were the case then we would, in a sense, be the first. Or maybe it's the latter: Fermi's 'everybody' are all out there, but for some reason don't want us to know that. This book is a compendium of fifty possible explanations of that sort, from the stolidly scientific to the wildly speculative - and flawed: many contain assumptions about alien psychology for instance (just one alien civilization behaving differently from the rest would flood the galaxy with radio transmissions or speeding spaceships). It's a thorough round-up which also reminded me just how odd all this is; any way you look at it, that silent sky may be the single most important fact our civilization has.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-22 00:00:00 Greet Van Thillo Very very fun. All the science-based speculations that I love about science fiction, without the misogynist plots.