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.

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."