Is Anybody Out There? -- First Review

From the April 25 edition of the UK's Sunday Times Online: "The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out" -- or so says Stephen Hawking, a British theoretical physicist, who, in 2009, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. More from the Times: "[Hawking] has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist -- but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all that it can to avoid any contact." These "suggestions" are from Stephen Hawking's Universe, his new documentary series on the Discovery Channel, which began its broadcast run earlier this month. Hawking goes on to say that making contact with extraterrestrials is "a little too risky. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans."

So, whereas we're all hoping that our first contact with alien races goes something like E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hawking portends a scenario that is more on the order of Independence Day. As he says elsewhere in this Times article: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

Sort of gives you those warm fuzzies all over, don't it? But, until such time as we actually experience (if ever) that first contact with an alien life form, we can only use the tools available to us to extrapolate (or, best case, guess) as to what that encounter may be like.

Which brings me to the fifteen stories -- from seventeen authors -- included in my forthcoming anthology Is Anybody Out There? (co-edited with Nick Gevers) from Daw Books. The official publication date is June 1, but I hope to have copies available at BayCon, to be held Memorial Day Weekend. And please excuse this shameless self-promotion: If you click on the Is Anybody Out There? book icon on the left, you will be painlessly transported to the realm of amazon.com, where you may purchase a copy of said book, if you so choose. [End shameless self-promotion.]

In 1950, Enrico Fermi postulated a contradiction (aka paradox): If there are uncountable galaxies within our universe, each containing uncountable planets, and some percentage of those planets are habitable (by our human definition of "habitable"), then why is there no evidence -- at least none that we have found and understood so far -- of alien civilizations? And it is those eleven words that I have set off by em-dashes and placed in italics that are the key to this paradox. The evidence may be out there, but our scientists and researchers simply do not understand it¹. The stories in this anthology attempt to answer the Fermi Paradox. Some of these stories utilize current science; others bend and twist that science; and more than one story is pure SWAG².

In previous blog posts I have waxed poetic on the genesis of this anthology; on the contents of this anthology; and on the cover and back cover text. And in this blog post I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the first review of Is Anybody Out There?

The review -- by the inestimable Gardner Dozois -- appears in the May 2010 issue of Locus Magazine. Just on the extremely rare chance that you are not familiar with Mr. Dozois, let me quote a few lines from his entry in Wikipedia: "...best known as an editor, winning a record 15 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor (having won nearly every year between 1988 and his retirement from Asimov's in 2004)....[and] the editor of the anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, published annually since 1984."

eARC Giveaway Redux (Revised Rules)

A few people have contacted me directly with some questions -- and related confusion -- regarding my eARC giveaway. So, I will restate the giveaway in this new post, without any subsidiary information, in an effort to keep it simple. The giveaway rules have changed (i.e. there is one less rule), and a bonus has been added.

On June 1, DAW Books will publish anthology Is Anybody Out There? which I co-edited with Nick Gevers. The anthology contains 15 original science fiction stories that address the Fermi Paradox: If the universe consists of billions of galaxies, and each galaxy contains some number of Earth-like planets, why have we not made contact with -- or found evidence of -- other living species?

If you have an interest in the genesis of this anthology, you can read about it here; if you want more insight into the contents, you can read about that here; and lastly, if you want to read the back cover text, you'll find that here. These are all links to my previous blog posts.

The contents of Is Anybody Out There?

Paul McAuley, "Introduction: Here Comes Everyone"
Alex Irvine, "The Word He Was Looking For Was Hello"
Michael Arsenault, "Residue"
Yves Meynard, "Good News from Antares"
Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn, "Report From the Field"
Jay Lake, "Permanent Fatal Errors"
Paul Di Filippo, "Galaxy of Mirrors"
Sheila Finch, "Where Two Or Three"
David Langford, "Graffiti in the Library of Babel"
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, "The Dark Man"
Ray Vukcevich, "One Big Monkey"
Pat Cadigan, "The Taste of Night"
Matthew Hughes, "Timmy, Come Home"
Ian Watson, "A Waterfall of Lights"
Felicity Shoulders & Leslie What, "Rare Earth"
James Morrow, "The Vampires of Paradox"

Now, about the giveaway: I have a PDF file available of the Advanced Reading Copy (eARC) of this anthology. If you are a science fiction book blogger and/or book reviewer -- and you have an interest in blogging about/reviewing Is Anybody Out There? -- then here are the rules:

1. You must have a Twitter account.

2. Send a tweet using hashtag #IAOT.

Even though a tweet is 140 characters in length, you don't actually have 140 characters to work with because you must use hashtag #IAOT (6 characters total: 5 characters plus the preceding or following space). Since you are not sending the tweet specifically to me, I will track it using the hashtag. This is a public hashtag so anyone within the Twitterverse may read your tweet.

Use the remaining 134 characters to promote your blog, your reviews, whatever you feel necessary to encourage me to send you the eARC of Is Anybody Out There? Be as creative as this minimal space will allow. You may include anything you wish, such as links to your blog, reviews, etc. (I suggest you use a link shortener such as tinyURL or bit.ly in order to use as few characters as possible.)

That's just 134 characters total of creative thought! And it's good PR for your blog/reviews as well.

3. Only one tweet per person or ID; and, again, the tweet must include the hashtag #IAOT.

4. The deadline for all tweets using the #IAOT hashtag is Friday, April 30, at midnight (Pacific time).

5. The winning individual(s) will be contacted directly after the close of the giveaway. (I may also include the tweets in a follow-up blog post, since they are public postings anyhow.)

6. BONUS: This contest is initially for a PDF file of the Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of Is Anybody Out There? Once I have received my physical copies of the book, I will personally send the winning individual(s) a copy of the book at my expense.


If you have any questions regarding this giveaway, please feel free to post here and/or tweet me, and I will do my best to respond.

Tweet This

Is Anybody Out There? -- eARC Giveaway

Just after I posted my previous blog entry on Is Anybody Out There? -- an anthology of original stories based on the Fermi Paradox, to be published by DAW Books on June 1 -- I received an email from my co-editor on the project, Nick Gevers. When Nick and I were actively working on this book, emails were flying constantly through the aether between us, especially since email is the only method of communication that we use: I reside in Northern California and Nick resides in South Africa! But now that the book is complete and we're just awaiting its publication, the volume of email between us has declined drastically. So receiving his email shortly after I clicked the "Publish Post" button on my blog entry was indeed a coincidence. Or possibly "synchronous" would be the more apropos word.

In his email, Nick informed me of a new nonfiction book entitled The Eerie Silence by physicist/cosmologist Paul Davies. The U.S. edition, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is subtitled Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. But even more interesting, considering our own forthcoming anthology, is the subtitle of the UK edition (the specific edition that Nick mentioned), from Allen Lane Publishers: Are We Alone in the Universe?

So I did a bit of searching, and found an article entitled "SETI at 50" on Failure Magazine that features a Paul Davies interview, in support of the publication of his new book. Since its inception, SETI has searched beyond Earth for radio signals, all to no avail. So Paul Davies -- director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, co-director of the Cosmology Initiative (both at Arizona State University), and chairman of the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup -- is suggesting that we attempt other means of detection and communication. Here's Davies' own words, from the interview:

...It's too soon to say it's a waste of time to carry on with traditional SETI. I think it's a great thing, but maybe after 50 years the public might be thinking, "Can we try something else?" And I think we should. We should think much more expansively about what a signature of intelligence might be. Forget messages, all we really want to know is: Is anyone out there? Their presence could be betrayed in a large number of ways....

...ET might use biological organisms as a means of sending information. Genomes are packed full of information. If you could get a message into a cell somehow it would just replicate and replicate. If you could do that in a way that doesn't compromise the biological functionality of the host then you've got something that could endure for millions and millions of years. So rather than sending radio messages, I would be in favor of, for example, dispatching viruses -- retroviruses -- that would insert DNA into any DNA-based organisms.... So why don't we search as many genomes as we can get our hands on, not just human -- just to see. It's a crazy idea, but then all of SETI is slightly crazy. I believe we should do what we can do easily and cheaply even if the chances of success are exceedingly small....

...If [SETI scientists] succeed, it will probably be the most momentous scientific discovery in history. So to allocate some small fraction of the world's resources to addressing such a very deep question is certainly justified. And even if SETI fails, it's very healthy that we address issues like: What is nature? What is humanity? What is our destiny? What do we mean by life? What do we mean by intelligence? What is our place in the universe? These are all good things to think about, even if we never pick up a signal.

Is Anybody Out There? -- Revealed

If you're a Star Trek fan, you may recall in the series ST:The Next Generation, in the episode entitled "Relics" (First aired: 12 October 1992), the Enterprise picks up a distress call from a transport vessel that has been missing for 75 years. "As the Enterprise drops out of warp to respond to the signal, the starship is rocked violently by a massive gravitational field. Although initial scans do not find the source of the field, they trace the field to its center and discover a massive spherical structure, 200 million kilometers in diameter (or two-thirds of the Earth's orbit around the Sun). The sphere's dimensions are consistent with those of the (until then) theoretical structure known as a Dyson Sphere."¹ This is the episode in which the Enterprise discovers that a pattern has been locked in the transport vessel's transporter buffer these past 75 years, and after some tinkering by the Enterprise crew, Captain Montgomery "Scotty" Scott materializes on the transporter pad.

The Dyson Sphere is named after noted physicist Freeman Dyson, who originated the idea in 1959. Via @projectblackcat, I found a link to the Discovery Enterprise blog, which features a video of Dyson from the TED Conference -- Technology, Entertainment, Design -- held in Monterey, California, in February 2003. I'll save you the trouble of clicking on over to the DE blog and include the video below. Dyson speaks on searching for life in the outer Solar System; he is a genius, a space geek, even a comedian, as you'll see if you watch the vid, and though he rambles a bit, if you have the time (approximately 20 minutes), it is well worth the investment. More after the vid....

The Fermi Paradox Redux: Is Anybody Out There?

My blog post of March 18 -- entitled The Fermi Paradox -- detailed the genesis of the anthology Is Anybody Out There? that I am co-editing with Nick Gevers, to be published by Daw Books in June 2010. So far, it has been more than a two-year journey, and nearly three years will have passed by the time the book actually sees print.

In that initial post, I stated that Nick and I hoped to have the contents of the anthology determined by December -- which is, like, now! And, in fact, we have selected the stories to be included in the book. On December 13, I sent an email to all the authors with a listing of the contents. One of those authors posted the contents list on her LiveJournal, and then two other sites picked it up, and now I see that the information has spread from there -- so an appropriate web search over the past day or two would have yielded the results. But now that you are here, instead of there....

Submissions to this anthology were by invitation only; however, I think you will be surprised (and hopefully impressed in the end) with some of the "new" authors included in the anthology. We had 23 stories submitted, from which we chose 15 -- written by a total of 17 authors (two of the stories are collaborations). We also asked yet another well-known SF author to draft an introduction to round out the book.

But I'm going to keep you in suspense a wee bit longer while I mention a couple other items. Because of my involvement in this project, I occasionally receive links via email and Twitter for articles and such related to the Fermi Paradox. Recently @projectblackcat sent me a link to the January 2010 editorial in Sky & Telescope magazine. The editorial, entitled "Where Have All the Aliens Gone?" was written by Jacob Haqq-Misra (a Ph.D. candidate in meteorology and astrobiology at Penn State University) and Seth Baum (a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Penn State). The authors write: "If growth outstrips resources, human civilization may collapse. This could also explain the absence of extraterrestrials: despite the seeming vastness of the galaxy, perhaps exponential expansion is also unsustainable on a galactic scale." It's an excellent, albeit brief, editorial that tells us, in conclusion, that we had better "become responsible consumers and ensure our own long-term survival." The editorial is available via a PDF, and can be found on the last page of the file.

So this got me hooked on Sky & Telescope. The magazine has a new article online entitled "The Chance of Finding Aliens" by Govert Schilling (an astronomy writer in Utrecht, The Netherlands) and Alan M. MacRobert (senior editor of Sky & Telescope). It's a very lengthy (5 pages), detailed article, broken down into numerous sections. In one of those sections, the authors delve into -- and at great length -- each expression that comprises the Drake equation, which is used to calculate the potential number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy:

The article gets quite technical discussing each of these expressions, with calculations, graphs, and postulations -- and I'll leave this part of the article to those of you who might find this interesting. But it is the last page of the article that really piqued my interest. Schilling and MacRobert write:

And here is perhaps the most important point of all: the Fermi paradox turns the definition of "optimist" versus "pessimist" on its head when it comes to life in the universe.

If star-traveling intelligences are extremely rare or nonexistent, despite the abundance of planets where life can begin, there must be some kind of "Great Filter" that prevents the emergence of interstellar colonists. Is the Great Filter something in our past, or our future? If we've already passed it – that is, if the filter is the origin of life, or the leap from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, or the leap from single-celled organisms to large multicellular animals, or from animal brains to human brains -- then the great test is behind us, and our way is open to spreading to the stars.

But if the Great Filter lies ahead of us -- for instance, if technological civilizations arise often but always destroy themselves -- then we are doomed. We will never get to the stars. Because (by definition) we are extremely unlikely to beat the odds that have already filtered out all who made it as far as we have now.

So, if there is in fact some "Great Filter," is it behind us? Are we simply holding ourselves back by not investing enough funds -- and thus effort and technology -- in human planetary travel? Or, is the "Great Filter" in front of us, and we are doomed to extinction because we will inevitably destroy ourselves -- either through war of one form or another, or through the unrepentant, excessive consumption of all our natural resources?

The Fermi Paradox

Science fiction author and scientist Geoffrey A. Landis writes:

"The galaxy contains roughly a hundred billion stars. If even a very small fraction of these have planets which develop technological civilizations, there must be a very large number of such civilizations. If any of these civilizations produce cultures which colonize over interstellar distances, even at a small fraction of the speed of light, the galaxy should have been completely colonized in no more than a few million years. Since the galaxy is billions of years old, Earth should have been visited and colonized long ago... The absence of any evidence for such visits is the Fermi paradox."

This excerpt is from an article entitled "The Fermi Paradox: An Approach Based on Percolation Theory," published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1998, which Landis later presented at the NASA Symposium "Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace" in 1993. The full article is available on the author's website.

I mention this article by way of my own introduction -- just in case you are unfamiliar with the term Fermi Paradox: I am pleased to announce that co-editor Nick Gevers and I have sold Fermi Paradox-themed original anthology, Is Anybody Out There? to Daw Books via Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books, for publication in 2010.

Hopefully you will recognize the name of my co-editor, Nick Gevers: he has had a regular short-fiction review column in Locus magazine since 2001; he has written reviews and literary criticism for the Washington Post Book World and the New York Review of Science Fiction, among many other venues. Nick is also an editor for British indie publisher PS Publishing; and, he has had two original anthologies published so far this year: Other Earths (with Jay Lake, Daw Books) and Steampunk! (Solaris Books).

This week Nick and I sent out our first round of formal invitations to authors (we've received only one decline so far!) and we're excitedly awaiting the influx of incredibly fine short stories in the weeks and months ahead. Here's an excerpt from the "pitch" we sent to our authors:

Why is it that, in such a vast cosmos, with hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone, and no doubt billions of Earth-like planets orbiting them, we have found no evidence of intelligent alien life? No evidence that aliens have ever visited Earth (other than discredited UFO mythology), no detectable signals in all our SETI searches with radio telescopes... So: we’re asking for entertaining stories that explore explanations for this enigma, looking seriously or comically at solutions to Fermi’s question. Is intelligent life a fluke, arising only once or twice in the universe’s long history? Does intelligence arise frequently, but with gulfs of time and distance keeping technological civilizations irretrievably apart? Do such civilizations inevitably implode or self-destruct within a few hundred years? Is our definition of intelligence fatally subjective? Are aliens among us right now, unseen? Are there aliens everywhere, but determined not to let us notice them? These, or other hypotheses, no matter how unlikely, should inform contributions to Is Anybody Out There?