The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? by Paul Davies (PDF)

Description

On April 8, 1960, a young American astronomer, Frank Drake, turned a radio telescope toward the star Tau Ceti and listened for several hours to see if he could detect any artificial radio signals. With this modest start began a worldwide project of potentially momentous significance. Known as SETI – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – it is an amalgam of science, technology, adventure, curiosity and a bold vision of humanity’s destiny. Drake has said that SETI is really a search for ourselves – who we are and what our place might be in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Yet with one tantalizing exception, SETI has produced only negative results. After millions of hours spent eavesdropping on the cosmos astronomers have detected only the eerie sound of silence. What does that mean? Are we in fact alone in the vastness of the universe? Is ET out there, but not sending any messages our way? Might we be surrounded by messages we simply don’t recognize? Is SETI a waste of time and money, or should we press ahead with new and more sensitive antennas? Or look somewhere else? And if a signal were to be received, what then? How would we – or even should we – respond

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐When this book first came out four years ago it caused a brief stir within the SETI community although it seems to have been quickly forgotten afterward. Paul Davies is an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and he has been peripherally involved in SETI for many decades. He heads the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup which is supposed to make recommendations concerning how first contact is to be handled. The basic gist of Davies’ book is that the current SETI community is going about the job all wrong. They are looking for the wrong signal in the wrong way at the wrong time and Davies has some specific suggestions for a New SETI that will correct the mistakes of the Old SETI and put it on the right track. He calls the lack of success of the Old SETI during the past fifty years the Eerie Silence although by the end of the book he lets on that this failure may have more significance than just the mere fact that the Old SETI technique has been all wrong.So it is no surprise that the book stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy within the SETI community when it was first published. It was probably intended to do just that. But after reading the entire book I can’t help but thinking that Davies’ suggestions for improvement are a bit vague and nonspecific with many of them not having anything specifically to do with the search for intelligence out there, but rather a general astrobiological program designed to improve our understanding of many of the terms of the Drake equation.But before we begin discussing these let’s take a look at the general mode of search that modern SETI takes and how it would confirm a signal. Let’s imagine a radio dish somewhere pointed at some point in the heavens and searching a wide swath of the microwave spectrum. Let’s suppose that it picks up a suspiciously strong signal. This comes to the attention of the operator who initiates a series of self-checks on the radio hardware and computer software. If everything comes back normal he or she will then point the radio dish away from the supposed source of the signal. The signal fades away. Then the operator points the radio dish back on the source and the signal returns. The excitement begins to build. The next step required in order to confirm a celestial source is for another radio telescope located thousands of miles away to repeat these steps. So the operator calls up another operator at a remote location and urges him or her to do the same steps. Depending on circumstances this may take hours or more. But assuming the remote radio dish performs the same steps and obtains the same results we are now talking about a real candidate signal that could be announced to the press.This is pretty much the signal detection protocol that modern microwave SETI is using today. Note that it has some built-in assumptions. It assumes that ET will produce a narrow-band signal at some specific wavelength that will last long enough for the detection protocol to be carried out. If the signal is not like that (take for example the 1977 Wow! signal that lasted 72 seconds) then it can never be confirmed. Thus, pulsed signals that do not repeat within a short time period would be eliminated by this detection protocol. Our detection strategy assumes that ET will produce signals with the properties that we assume. If our assumptions are wrong then our SETI program is doomed to failure.Davies may be right about SETI having some bad assumptions. Others such as the Benford brothers have said as much. But Davies’ New SETI would greatly broaden the search parameters and types of searches and also the money it would take to carry the program out. For example, Davies suggests that we search for a possible shadow biosphere on Earth which had a separate origin from normal life. The reason he gives is that if life started independently on Earth twice the odds that it would begin on other planets would be much higher.The only problem is that Davies is not quite clear on how different this Shadow Biosphere would have to be in order to indicate a second independent genesis of life. He proposes various things such as this weird life using opposite chirality (i.e., right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars) from normal life or perhaps the incorporation of other elements (say arsenic instead of phosphorus in the DNA backbone). All of these attributes if discovered would make such life seem strange to us but it’s not clear if this would indicate a second genesis of life or a fourth domain of life in addition to eukarya, bacteria, and archaea. How strange does the life have to be in order to indicate a second genesis? Davies is not clear on the topic. In any case this appears to be a general program in astrobiology having nothing to do with intelligence in the universe.Davies does propose that we search through the human genome and the genomes of other species looking for things that are out of the ordinary. Perhaps ET has left a message buried in our genome that has been waiting for us to discover it for millions of years. It’s not clear how such a genomic message could remain intact after long periods of mutation and natural selection that would tend to distort it. Perhaps any initial message in the DNA would have been randomized away a long time ago. And how would ET even know that life on Earth is based on DNA to begin with? Davies doesn’t tell us.After that suggestion Davies launches into a wide range of suggestions which all have the same commonality. We should look for anything out of the ordinary – stuff that shouldn’t be there that is, or stuff that should be there that isn’t. And this program is to be carried out across all the various disciplines of science. Some of the examples given are searching stellar spectra looking for elements that shouldn’t be there. If we detect a structure of stars in our galaxy having spectral lines from radioactive isotopes we might conclude that this is a wave front from some advancing galactic colonization project. Other suggestions by Davies are more absurd. Perhaps the fact that magnetic monopoles have never been detected even though physical theory suggests that they should exist is evidence that ET stole them! I kid you not, that is one of Davies’ examples of an anomaly.There are other more down-to-Earth suggestions such as the search for alien artifacts on the earth, the moon, or other planets of our solar system. Perhaps there are Bracewell probes or Von Neumann machines somewhere in our solar system that are waiting for us to make the first step in contacting them. Back in the 1960’s the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a systematic search strategy for large alien engineering structures based on observing at millimeter wavelengths. It’s a pity that all these years later Davies appears not to have heard anything about these plans. The best he can do is offer a suggestion that we look for Dyson spheres which has already been done.After reading most of these suggestions one gets the notion that Davies is throwing everything he can think of up on the wall to see which ones will stick. This is not a serious, comprehensive search strategy to replace the Old SETI. Some of these efforts might be worthwhile although why Davies supports any of them is a bit perplexing. As he finally lets on in the last chapter of the book Davies believes we are the only intelligent species in the entire observable universe. With such a disposition why did he write this book and why does he support SETI at all? It seems to be a complete contradiction. If we are alone in the universe as Davies supposes then not only will the Old SETI fail but any New SETI he comes up with will fail as well.So I was left scratching my head at the end of the book and left wondering why Davies cares about any of this stuff at all.

⭐This is a fascinating and useful book, with an important question: one asked in many forms by several scientists, where are they? Despite a problem I have with the author’s dubious embrace of Darwinian evolution (for which I routinely knock off one star from a five star book), the book is perhaps one of the best balanced treatments of the subject.I think that the confusion over Darwinian evolution is throwing scientists off the scent. The whole scenario is impossible, as Hoyle warned. And a similar statement could be made for proponents of design arguments, not so much because they wrong as because their version discredits the whole idea. Current science has missed something deep and major, that religion has itself confused: the possibility of a form of higher nature that can allow within nature forms of existence that are equivalent to ‘soul’. There have been a number of speculations here about ‘bodies of light’, and such. The point is that there is the suspicion the space-time barrier, and space travel of the interstellar brand, is a red herring. I can’t take that any further, but if physicists can speculate about wormholes, then I plan to take up the genre myself. As for ‘bodies of light’, well, the proof is lacking, but it sure would solve the interstellar parsec loneliness problem: the point is that the supernatural might be different (and totally unknowable) from the ‘spiritual’ inside nature, in a mode we should some day be able to discover. At the risk of guffaws from the physics die-hards, I would suggest that sci-fi has often stumbled on answers, and that the movie Avatar (spare me your tee-hees) shows the ‘soul’ in a kind bio-field analogous to an electromagnetic field. ???Beyond all that the philosopher Kant (and then Schopenhauer) produced an obvious solution in potential to the ‘soul’ question in the sense that the categories of space-time are seen as aspects of the mind itself, which stands before the space-time matrix, in essence.The suspicion arises then that under the right conditions ‘space-travel’ happens not in a ‘long time’ at low speed, but in no time, beyond even lightspeed, and thus is seen, well, as a refocus of the mind ???.Finally, design arguments have too long been hostage to religious supernaturalism. But the idea of a natural demiurge is as old as Plato and is often suggested in relation to theistic confusions. And, we might add, the issue of human evolution.As to the ‘eeerie silence’, this could be a prison planet. How many times have you tried to make contact with felons in prisons??If you disagree here, then you should be honest, and never watch Star Wars reruns, again, ever….BTW, there is a solid rumor that the ‘aliens’ have already arrived, bypassed homo sapiens, and established contact with cetacean species: Moby Dick was a alien counterattacking against the predatory whaling industry.

⭐This is a great book. I always enjoy reading Paul Davies’ work – he is an amazing thinker, writer and communicator. Part scientist, part philosopher, Mr Davies has spent his life seeking answers to the biggest questions, the greatest of which is ‘Are we alone?’ – the subject of this bookDo not be lulled into thinking that this is simply a round up of all the credible evidence for extra-terrestrial life we have so far uncovered. That would be a very short book indeed because, put simply…there is noneBy contrast, this book contains a wide ranging analysis of the implications of our hitherto failed attempts to search for extra-terrestrial life – the ‘eerie silence’ of the title. Given our failure, this leads Davies to the question: ‘What should we look for instead?’And the fact is, the answers are far from simple. Most people are aware that the SETI programme is actively searching for radio signals from inter-stellar space. But, as the author (himself head of SETI’s Post Detection Task Group) argues, is this really the best place to look? In a universe as vast as ours, radio signals from distant galaxies will take millions of years to reach us. Given that the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, countless numbers of advanced civilisations could have arisen and then simply disappeared in that time. If life is rare – as we are increasingly forced to accept – and the universe is both very large and very old, can we ever expect technologically advanced civilisations to exist within communicable distances of each other? The fact is, we search the radio spectrum because it is a technology we have mastered, not because it is necessarily a good place to look…Davies then goes on to sketch out what we might look for instead. What would an advanced civilisation look like? What tell-tale footprint would it leave in the cosmos? What would it have achieved in technological terms? How would it actually communicate with us? Would it actually have any interest in doing so? Do civilisations inevitably ‘do science’? Should we look closer to home – for evidence of more than one ‘genesis’ on Earth perhaps? (Again, the only only evidence we have points to a single one, from which all life on Earth is descended. If there had been more than one, at least we could say that the probability of life elsewhere would be greatly increased)This is great stuff. The summation of a life of scientific, intellectual and philosophical thought and endeavour.Finally, Davies discusses the profoundest possibility of all. That, in this unimaginably vast universe we are utterly alone. This would mean that the chances of life arising anywhere in the vastness of space and time are are vanishingly close-to but not quite zero, making life on Earth unbelievably special. However unlucky you may feel in life, the fact of our existence might be one of the most amazing pieces of good fortune it is possible to imagine. I find this thought beautifully life-affirming!

⭐The Eerie Silence is a book that is by turns fascinating and frustrating. There’s no denying the credentials of the man who writes it, but in many respects the book is a lesson in the folly of generalising from a sample-set of one. To be fair to the author, he consistently makes this point himself, but I wonder from the conclusions he has drawn how deeply he has internalised it. If there was a second theme to the book, it is in the arrogance of presumption – again, a point acknowledged but repeatedly discarded. The author makes the reasonable point that in the absence of any real knowledge of what extraterrestrial life might be we have to work on the assumption that what *we* know about the laws of physics are treated as universal invariants. If those hold to be true it seems unlikely that there is any life in the galaxy, perhaps even the universe, beyond that which may be found in our own solar system. This he attributes to the fact SETI has heard no signals from ET, and that humanity’s explorations of the solar system have not found evidence of life that would suggest that the genesis of such is a ‘cosmic imperative’.Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed the book a lot, but I felt that the argument he made was very much slanted towards that conclusion. For example, he talks of the ‘eerie silence’ and asks whether or not fifty years of silence is enough to decide that we’re alone in the galaxy. Of course it isn’t, and he concludes such (albeit grudgingly). He himself points out that given the likely timescales of putative extraterrestrial civilizations, the idea that they would use radio signals to communicate over interstellar distances is a anthocentric assumption that likely wouldn’t be true. The Earth, in the early days of radio, leaked signals into the galaxy in an ever expanding shell of information – now, most of the signals that we send for a vastly more complex telecommunications infrastructure are handled via optical cables or reflected back to the earth via satellites. Despite becoming, arguably, more clever as a species, we have become almost exponentially quieter. Due to the distances involved, signal degradation and Doppler shifting, those early signals which we sent are likely indistinguishable from background noise to any civilization within our own cosmic back garden. Davis talks of the ‘drunk at the lamppost’, looking for his dropped keys in the circle of light, not because they’re there but because the chance of finding them anywhere else is infinitesimally small. So it likely is with SETI, except the drunk isn’t so much looking but waiting for the keys to call out to him.That’s not to say that I think SETI is a bad investment of time and effort – far from it – while the odds are long, the rewards would be massive. It is to say though that I think the 50 years of eerie silence is no reason to even start thinking that there is no life out there, and claims to the contrary seem to smack of the unbearable arrogance of anthocentric thinking.Other arguments marshaled against the existence of extraterrestrial life are presented in a ‘sleight of hand’ manner – for example, that of the ‘great filter’ which is a wholly hypothetical thought exercise, the explanation of which which is concluded with the phrase ‘Though Carter’s argument may seem to knock the stuffing out of SETI’. If it is true, perhaps it does – but the *entire foundation* of the argument is based on the idea that we live in the last epoch of intellectual viability before the heat-death of our planet. Earth may be very typical in that respect, or it may be entirely unique. The great filter argument is no more credible than any other which generalises from our own tiny pool of experience. The argument that the scientific method is a pre-requisite of communication is fair, and comes after a very interesting discussion of astrobiology and the possibility of a second genesis on earth. After talking so long about evolution and how evolution seems like a good candidate for a cosmic imperative[1], he then ignores the implications of this when discussing our own intellectual evolution. He talks about how monotheism was instrumental in evolving the scientific method[2], and ignores the fact that evolution also works on social structures. I don’t know if society evolves towards the scientific method over a long enough period of time, but neither does anyone else.Perhaps the most important thing in this review is the fact that my comments relate to the arguments made, and not to the book itself. It’s a really interesting, well structured discussion of both the state of the art in SETI and some of the factors that may contribute to an ‘eerie silence’. He does not dismiss the possibility of life, and is at least fair-minded enough to acknowledge counterpoints to his own argument even if he doesn’t truly give them the necessary time to develop. I would very much recommend the book to anyone interested in SETI, but I’d say first ‘pair it up with a similar book from an optimist’. The nature of universal scale in both size and time means that the answer likely *won’t* be found somewhere inbetween, but there’s no reason to conclude from the silence that we are alone even in our own immediate neighbourhood of the galaxy.[1] If life evolves, then it *evolves*.[2] Generalising from a pool of one, once again

⭐An eye-opening account of the fact that life on earth was something of a miracle itself , never mind life elsewhere in the Universe. I know this is the one fact Jehovah’s witnesses rely on to promote their God argument. But God is not mentioned in this book apart from the fact that monotheism seems to have been a necessary ingredient in developing the scientific method itself. I am a sceptic when it comes to most things , but I’m inclined to believe that there is definitely intelligent life out there , although I very much doubt we will ever find it. Paul Davies does a great job in explaining the pros and cons though.

⭐Thoroughly enjoyable, stimulating and interesting read. Strikes a good balance between speculative fantasy and remaining grounded in solid science.

⭐Covering a wide range of scientific concepts, in an easy to understand mental route, yet not dumbing down a most intriguing series of subjects. After reading this, I have gained a larger understanding of science and mankind’s place within the cosmos.

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