| THE EERIE SILENCE Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence Paul Davies Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-547-13324-9 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-547-13324-3 | 242pp. | HC/FCI | $27.00 | |
| Page 16: | "Without oxygen there can be no ozone layer, so the surface of Mars is subjected to withering ultraviolet radiation from the sun." |
| Capitalization: S/B "The Sun". |
| Page 25: | "At that time, belief in any form of extraterrestrial life, let alone intelligent alien beings, wa seen as pure science fiction..." |
| It's not clear what time this is referring to. |
| Page 50: | "For ex-ample, standard life is preyed upon by viruses..." |
| Unwanted hyphen: S/B "example". |
| Page 100: | "A good compromise would be a burst of about one second's duration about once a year." |
| Referring to the operation of an interstellar beacon, this statement appears problematical. I assume it means an Earth year; but there is nothing special about that period. Surely some better scientific basis for the pulse interval can be found. |
| Page 108: | "When the time is ripe, the probe would then log on to an appropriate website via a microwave link and publicly announce its existence." |
| Just like that, eh? This posits an automated probe from another civilization lurking (in both the classical and cyberspace senses) somewhere in our system, taking in our Internet traffic in order to learn about us. I'm not sure how it would find and tap into a microwave beam, or break the password security to log in (although given the state of many systems, a dictionary method would not take long.) I can readily accept that a probe might be here, monitoring our broadcasts. But this, overall, really does seem like science fiction. |
| Page 118: | "It is, after all, much faster and cheaper to send radio waves across interstellar space that big metal machines." |
| I'll buy faster. But I don't think cheaper can be easily defended — not when you consider the whole system, including personnel and life-cycle costs. |
| Page 127: | "One unrealistic aspect of Landis's analysis was any element of competitiveness." |
| Missing words: S/B "was lack of any element of". At least, so it seems to me. |
| Page 162: | "The considerable literature on 'uploading', a fantasy in which the contents of ageing brains, and by implication their associated conscious selves, are transferred to a computer..." |
| Spelling: S/B "aging brains" in the U.S. — but his version, of course, is the British way. |
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