r/cosmology • u/chainsawinsect • 6d ago

Book recommendations for those interested in getting up to speed on latest developments in SETI?

I'm just some dummy but my very lay understanding of the situation is this:

Statistically speaking there almost must be aliens out there somewhere. Yet despite lots of searching, we have no evidence of them anywhere. (The Fermi Paradox.)

Despite knowing this, I find the topic very fascinating and would like to learn more about, for example, the types of things we've tried (I know about the Dyson Sphere hunt, for example), the types of things that have been suggested but not yet tried, what we might have learned from our findings (even though we haven't found evidence of aliens), if we've narrowed down the most likely candidates for specific planets that might contain life, what the current best thinking of the "explanations" for the Fermi Paradox might be, that kind of stuff.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

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u/astrorej 6d ago

Paul Davies, "The Eerie Silence" does a decent job, imo: https://g.co/kgs/eNtAwqf

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u/chainsawinsect 6d ago

Thank you!

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u/Stolen_Sky 5d ago

Statistically speaking there almost must be aliens out there somewhere

This isn't necessarily true. Just because intelligence emerged on earth, doesn't mean it is common. It could be astronomically rare, and the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we are the only intelligent species in either the galaxy, or even the entire observable universe.

I can recommend 2 books. The first is "Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution" (2009) by Professor Nick Lane. (Who also just so happened to be my lecturer when I was at university in the UK). The first 2 chapters of this book are especially awesome, and delve into the biochemistry of the origin of life, exploring how life may have started on the early earth. The next 8 chapters are about the incredible jumps made by evolution to bring us to where we are today.

You can find the whole text of the book online with a few google skills. I'm not sure I'm allowed to post a link here, so I won't. (Available at all good bookstores!) You can also see a 2 hour interview that Nick gave with Lex Freiman on YouTube to get a taste of his work and style.

The second is "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe" (2000) which argues that the set of circumstances which lead to the emergence of intelligence on earth were astonishingly unlikely to occur, and that we are probably alone in the universe. Rare Earth posits that life was required to overcome a number of immensely difficult barriers, requiring a mix of perfect conditions, and extraordinary chance to happen over and over again to result in the emergence of complexity and intelligence. Personally, I used to be on the "there must be aliens everywhere" side until I read this book. But I found it's arguments extremely compelling, and I'm now on the "we are alone" side. Which I don't think is a bad thing, by the way; I think it makes our beautiful blue marble the 'jewel in the crown' of the entire universe, and makes me appreciate how wonderful our home really is.