Is Anybody Out There? -- Recent Reviews

As I've posted previously, and you may have read elsewhere, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the SETI program: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And unlike movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T. or Independence Day, scientists have as yet discovered no sign, good or ill, of extraterrestrial intelligence. But now that 50 years have passed with no such sign, these very same scientists are beginning to rethink their methodology.

"Alien hunters should look for artificial intelligence" is the title of an article by Jason Palmer, a science and technology reporter, for the BBC News. (via @daj42) The article includes an audio link to a 3-minute, 30-second recording by Dr. Seth Shotak on "what form 'aliens' may take." Dr. Shostak is a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and he "argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short....that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than 'biological' life."

This comment on "alien AI" brought to mind one of the stories included in my co-edited anthology Is Anybody Out There? (with Nick Gevers, from Daw Books, June 2010), which includes the story "A Waterfall of Lights" by Ian Watson. In the story, ophthalmologist Roderick Butler (who teamed up with an artist to create an experimental project at the Museum of Modern Art), says to the visitors on opening night: "...let me introduce you to the aliens in our midst, the super-intelligent evolved immortal creations of aliens from another cosmos which preceded ours! They are in your very own eyes! We don’t see the aliens in our universe because it is through those alien intelligences that we perceive!"

To paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip, "We have met the aliens, and they are us."

Last month, Ray Vukcevich (@rayvuk), one of the contributors to the anthology, sent me a link to yet another BBC News article, which revealed the Top 10 "unanswerable" questions. The data was based on approximately 1.1 billion queries made on the Ask Jeeves search engine since its launch in 2000. Amongst questions like "What is the meaning of life?" (#1) and "Do blondes have more fun?" (#4) and "What is love?" (#7), can be found question #5: "Is there anybody out there?"

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Is Anybody Out There? plus more on SETI

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, this year marks the 50th Anniversary of the SETI program -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This is why we've seen far more than the usual number of articles, interviews, and new books and their corresponding reviews on the subject.

In fact, not too many months ago -- April 25, to be exact -- the UK's Sunday Times Online ran an article on Stephen W. Hawking's (pictured above) new Discovery Channel documentary, with the following quote from the physicist: "The aliens are out there, and Earth had better watch out." Now, in a new audio recording with Big Think, Professor Hawking warns us that humanity's survival depends on inhabiting the stars: "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load." And, of course, while we're at it, we need to be wary of ET! The Big Think piece is quite compelling; Hawking states that he is an optimist, but his outlook for the human race is very bleak. And there are more than 50 Comments to the article, some as intriguing as (if not more so than) the article itself.

This past weekend, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, hosted SETIcon, a convention that brought together representatives from science and research (Frank Drake), space exploration (Astronaut Rusty Schweickart), television & media (producer Andre Bormanis, actor John Billingsley), literature (authors Mary Roach & Robert J. Sawyer), music (Mickey Hart), and many others, and was open to the public. Speaking at the convention, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, said: "I actually think the chances that we'll find ET are pretty good....Young people in the audience, I think there's a really good chance you're going to see this happen." (quote courtesy of msnbc.com)

Of course the big questions continue to be: "How will we discover ET?" and/or "In what form(s) will we discover ET?" -- which was touched on in my previous blog on "50 Years of SETI" -- but if you haven't figured out where I'm headed with this then you haven't been reading my blog regularly.