Ostensibly a book about SETI (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence) it's really a book about why, after 50 years of trying fairly hard, we have yet to find any evidence of any forms of life (or even the right conditions) elsewhere in the galaxy.
Davies' view is that there isn't intelligent life elsewhere in this galaxy. He hopes there might be and hopes the very long odds are balanced by the depth of possibilities but he comes down on the 'it's pretty unlikely there's intelligent life out there. This chimes with my own thinking, partly because of the Fermi Paradox (if there's life out there, then where the hell is everyone) but also because it does seem that the conditions for life to emerge at all do seem to be pretty thin on the ground. Setting aside gamma ray bursts, stable star trajectories, appropriately sized planets, moons, solar system stability, position in the galaxy, tectonic activity, chemical mix etc etc etc. The odds would seem very long indeed.
In fact it's proved pretty damn hard to even find forms of life here on earth that aren't the standard - i.e. that might use arsenic instead of phosporus. We might be so improbably a feature of existence that it takes an entire galaxy (or universe) for us to arise...now there's a thought.
However whilst fairly easy to read the book is unsatisfying on a basic level - so many of Davies' thoughts don't go anywhere and quite a few are simply plopped onto the page as if he'd just thought of them at a dinner party (or read about them in a sci-fi book) and hadn't actually critically examined them.
For instance his views on inorganic lifeforms (i.e. machine intelligence) makes massive assumptions about the nature of intelligence as if it can be reduced to a purely quantitative understanding (the number of teraflops is his preferred approach), or that religions would not be able to facilitate finding life elsewhere - his misunderstanding of the 'only begotten son' text is particularly outstanding.
Also, having briefly touched on SETI as a religion, which is a very very interesting topic, he shies away from the implications of this and why supposedly rational scientists (who grew up with star trek, cold wars, Arthur C Clarke and post modernism) plump for attributing god like powers to aliens at every turn. The idea that we could rely on aliens to be altruistic is one of the more amusing and relies on such a romantic argument about moral goodness it never fails to make me slap my forehead in the lack of self awareness it reveals.
So it's a good book from two perspectives - the science is interesting and it reveals a whole lot about the social reasoning of a particular branch of science (cosmology and its hanger on fantasy subjects astrobiology, evolutionary biology etc.). One has the sense Davies shied away from really laying out the flaws in the more speculative regions for fear of a backlash. Shame really because blunt honesty could help the SETI project more than pandering to personal prejudices dressed up as scientific endeavour.
Should we do SETI? Given what I've already written you might think not but personally I think it's a useful activity and one to be appluaded. We may well be in a galaxy teaming with intelligent life and we'd be fools not to be humble enough to think the odds of there being others could be just as much in the favour of life as against it. Life might be tenacious and aggressive. It might always find a way when given half a chance. That's something I'd love to know the answer to.
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