Stephen Webb ↠ 0 review
5
I had never heard of the Fermi Paradox prior to reading this book, but by the end it really puts a lot of the UFO conspiracies and evolutionary idea's into perspective. This is not an Alien book. I will get this out there as soon as possible to ensure everybody looking at this book knows that. This is an interesting look into the idea that just maybe, we are very lonely in this universe. Who honestly knows. Stephen Webb has created a great book that asks all the questions and answers most of them as well.
The book is split into various number structures so at one point you use these as chapter points. The book is full of investigations and if you're a believer of Alien life, this book will fit nicely into your world. I had once thought that maybe the universe is full of life and that one day mankind would reach the stars and join into the scheme of things. Sadly this book gives you a solid gut punch and the realities of just how likely or unlikely life outside Earth will be. How often have you heard about UFO sightings? A lot yeah. The one thing that is puzzling is the fact they haven't bothered to make contact. These are the types of questions that you should be asking.
Stephen Webb should take another look back into this book and setup a sequel of sorts with what it is like now. It would be a shorter book to say the least, but a lot is happening in the world of science since the publication of this book. This is why reading science books from the last 10 to 20 years is a tough act, so much has now changed. Technology is going to be the key to reversing the devastation mankind has caused on this Earth, mainly the raising of CO2 levels to dangerously crazy levels. Consider it has now been 10000 years since the last ice age and that the Earth was riddled with Dinosaurs for millions of years. What if, and this is a huge what if, Aliens visited and noticed that there was no intelligent life. Why would they come back?
Why the 5?
The concluding chapter is incredible, it is a must read for everyone. If you check out the hash tag on Instagram in a few weeks I'll be writing the very last paragraph. When I suggest Webb should write a sequel, it is based on the whole evolution of man that has now been linked to the 150000 year mark of the y chromosome. So much has now been discovered. The next 100 years will be insane. There is going to be discovery and the colonisation of Mars. We now have the capabilities to alter our own DNA, that will ensure safe space travel, something that was a huge risk. Webb covers so much in this book and it is worth reading, just to learn what have been our errors for attempting first contact and what other books you should be reading. Fermi is a name I came across with Cosmos, and now I understand so much more. In a modern world of corporations and capitalism, we tend to forget our bigger purpose in life is exploration. I enjoyed how the book hits on points about our humanity and lack of it. Take the gamble and check it out, well worth the read and very relevant. 0387955011 Fun casual science read. Its interesting because solutions to the fermi paradox range from things relating to astrophysics, sociology, biology, and statistics, and he gives a good 0verview of the context for any given explanation he's dealing with. So it ends up being a little about how stars are formed, a little about amino acids, a little bit about baynesian inferences,, etc. Nice variety.
Anyways I think the most plausible explanations are the ones in a the general bucket of aliens have no desire to expand into the cosmos in general (there are multiple varieties of this-- they flee to another universe, they become computerized and miniaturized and go dark, they dive into black holes or into deep space for multiple reasons, whatever), or that life itself, or complex life is just extremely rare and fragile and we are truly alone.
One of the more disturbing possibilities he mentions (aside from the apocalyptic ones) is that even if complex intelligent life is fairly common, consciousness might be rare. In which case we might eventually run into some kind of drone or zombie esque race which we haven't detected because they don't communicate much and possibly don't expand much or advance technologically at a slower rate. 0387955011 vjerujem da je ova knjiga vrednija nego što to mogu percipirati. pitanjima izvanzemaljaca nisam se nikada bavila niti su mi bila osobito intrigantna; čak nemam niti neko jasno formulirano mišljenje o njihovoj egzistenciji (da ga imam, vjerujem da bi mi i knjiga bila interesantnija). ne poričem webbovu vještinu i posvećenost temi: odabrao je 50 odgovora na pitanje postoje li izvanzemaljci? (npr. oni su tu i nazivaju se mađarima, nisu imali dovoljno vremena da nas dosegnu, šalju signale, ali mi ih ne znamo primiti, ne žele uspostaviti kontakt itd...) i njih iscrpno objasnio. neke teorije su intrigantne, neke duhovite i smiješne, neke začuđujuće, neke znanstveno utemeljene - ima svega.. kako god, ukoliko te zanima ta tema, ovo će ti biti zabavno štivo, možda te poljuljati u dosadašnjim uvjerenjima i otvoriti vratašca za neke nove misli i pretpostavke. 0387955011 Not really my sort of thing. 0387955011 If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens…Where is Everybody?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life [2015] – ★★★★1/2
I am continuing with my Non-Fiction November Reading Challenge with this curious book on the Fermi paradox. This paradox states that, if there are billions of stars out there in galaxies, and they are similar to and much older than our Sun, there is a high probability that those distant systems have planets that resemble our planet Earth. In turn, the typical nature of our planet means life must have developed and accelerated on other planets too, and, if beings there developed interstellar travel, they should have visited Earth already (or at least sent their probes). The paradox is that we do not see/perceive any extraterrestrial activity. Dr Stephen Webb is a theoretical physicist who proposes and discusses seventy-five solutions to the Fermi paradox in this book, solutions which he divides into three sections: (i) Alien Are (or Were) Here; (ii) Aliens Exist, but We Have Yet to See or Hear from Them; and (iii) Aliens Do Not Exist. This is an enjoyable, mentally-stimulating book that impresses with the number and diversity of different solutions and theories that may explain the Fermi Paradox.
It is important to note from the outset that, although the book indulges in speculations on science, the topic of this book is not some kind of easily dismissible pseudo-science, but a perfectly scientific question that have been posed by serious scientists, including by Stephen Hawking. The paradox itself is named after Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist and a Nobel Prize Winner, who came up with the proposition after a series of laborious calculations that left him to conclude that we should have been visited by extraterrestrials a long time ago. I will obviously not describe each of the seventy-five solutions proposed, but will comment and share my thoughts on some of the more convincing or interesting ones under each heading of the book.
I. Extraterrestrials Are or Were Here
In this section of the book, Stephen Webb provides ten solutions and most of them border fantasy, such as theories that aliens are watching us from UFOs or that we are aliens. It is true that there was much publicity in the past about Kenneth Arnold’s sighing of an UFO in 1947 or about the Roswell UFO incident, but there is no hard evidence so far to substantiate these claims or prove the existence of extraterrestrial life. Given this, the belief that God exists is probably the most convincing argument in this section of the book.
II. Extraterrestrials Exist, but We Have Yet to See or Hear from Them
This line of reasoning is the most convincing one in the book and it is the most popular theory among scientists. In this section, Webb explores solutions to the Fermi paradox that revolve around the idea that aliens are signalling, but we are not receiving their signal for some reason. He also explores theories that stars may be too far away or intelligence is not permanent. One of the convincing solutions in this section is that advanced civilisations have simply become too inward-looking, rather than driven by exploration and a colonist mentality. That is why we do not see their presence in our solar system. I think that, given that human beings already “live in the Internet”, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that advanced civilisations on other planets are information-driven, and may be living in an artificial reality. They may have different values than us, having moved beyond exploitive and colonist worldviews.
Another hint on a solution that I found convincing in this section is that, galaxies may be swarming with alien civilisations, but “differences in age, abilities, physicality, etc. might lead to a qualitative difference between our minds and theirs…[resulting in] communication being impossible” [Webb, 2015: 196]. Clement Vidal, a Belgian physicist, also proposed that aliens might have already learnt now to manipulate energy from stars and space-time, not to mention them having different mathematics or being capable of manipulating molecules and atoms [2015: 197]. They may know the secrets of the universe and have a perfect control over the mind, space and time. This means that they may be simply too advanced or different from us to make any contact. I also believe that we may be simply too different to even recognise what they are – us understanding or imagining them is like a cat being able to understand all the concepts in a philosophy book or a prehistoric man imagining a game played on an iPad. Humans are also confined to their senses and consciousness, and we cannot see the world through another apparatus than a human brain. Also, given that the universe is thirteen billion years old, humans may simply have not listened long enough for any signals since, given the universe time-frame, the intelligent life has only been on the planet some seconds out of one hundred years universal time.
III. Extraterrestrials Do Not Exist
This section of the book also has some convincing arguments because we still do not know how special our planet is and how unique is life. Moreover, questions remain as to how unique consciousness and intelligence development are. It will only be possible to say for certain that extraterrestrials do not exist if we first answer this question – how precisely life started on Earth? There is still no definite answer to this question. Thus, in this section of the book, the author talks about such solutions to the paradox as “planetary systems are rare”, “planetary systems are too dangerous to live in”, “life’s genesis is rare”, “our moon is unique” and “high technology is not inevitable”. Exoplanets that have conditions that are similar to Earth are already said to exist, even though another argument is that “conditions on Earth have simply been too right” [Webb, 2015: 291]. Perhaps, there are conditions on other planets that make it possible for other life forms to emerge, life forms that do not need perfect-for-life-on-Earth conditions.
The unfortunate aspect of If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens is that it goes for breadth, rather than depth; the author is quick to dismiss theories that he personally finds ludicrous; and all the quotations that begin each solution come off as more unnecessarily pretentious, rather than insightful or helpful. Webb’s own solution at the end of the book is odd. It is like the author is trying to say: “I wrote a book on the Fermi paradox, proposing all these solutions, but I don’t believe in the paradox in the first place and do not think it should even exist”.
It is clear from reading this book that we still know very little to answer seriously such a big question as – do extraterrestrials exist? As Stephen Webb put it: “we have little idea about the nature of dark matter…and dark energy is a complete mystery….and we are still to reconcile gravity with quantum theory” [2015: 186]. If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens provides both more or less serious and science-fiction solutions to the paradox, and is really one mind-boggling journey into one of the mysteries of the universe that echoes the mystery of our own planetary existence. 0387955011
Webb je sve potkrepio naukom i dao moguca resenja Fermijevog paradoksa, ukljucujuci i svoje vidjenje. Izuzetno zanimljiva i pitka knjiga... 0387955011 Examining their navels?
This is the most up-to-date and thorough discussion of the Fermi Paradox that I have read. Stephen Webb examines all the popular solutions as well as some esoteric ones, giving us considerable background on each along with the benefit of his knowledge on a wide range of relevant subjects including microbiology, plate tectonics, evolution, intelligence, language, philosophy, as well as astronomy and cosmology. And then he gives his solution: we are alone.
That was Fermi's solution of course, and it is a popular one; however I don't think that Webb comes anywhere near to making a convincing case; and at any rate he is somewhat equivocal about whether his answer applies to the entire universe or to just the galaxy. It is clear that his answer applies only to life as we know it, having a carbon based biochemistry and a cellular structure. My feeling is that intelligent life forms may evolve from some other chemical basis or even from some use of energy and matter we know nothing about.
On pages 237 to 239 Webb presents his argument that we are the only extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) in the galaxy by a process of elimination, i.e., life must be on a planet within both a galactic habitable zone (GHZ) and a solar continuously habitable zone (CHZ) around the right kind of star; must avoid cosmic disasters like supernovae; must have the right kind of moon, Jupiter, and plate tectonics; must evolve beyond single cells; must develop tool use and language, etc. He ends up sifting out everything except us, and the only reason he doesn't sift us out is that he has set us aside since we actually exist!
This is close to sophistry, perhaps, but it has been argued before. I might call it the Fallacy of Elimination by Unknown Probabilities about Matters that May or May Not Be Essential. Putting that aside, consider this: If we extrapolate from what we know (as opposed to any speculation) about the existence of life in just our own galaxy, we should expect on average--at the very least--one ETC per galaxy. Wow. Far from being alone, this suggests more than 100 billion other ETCs are out there, although we are not likely to ever communicate with them.
One of the things this book demonstrates, as others have before (see especially, Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee's Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe [2000:], which Webb acknowledges as influential), is that when you're dealing with so little concrete information in such a vastness, it is impossible to be entirely convincing one way or the other. The conclusion in Rare Earth, with which Webb concurs, is that life is common in the universe, but intelligent life is rare. I agree substantially with this, but my rare is perhaps larger than their rare.
Some of the familiar but crucial questions considered here were addressed in the excellent Extraterrestrials: Where Are They? (1995) edited by Ben Zuckerman and Michael H. Hart. For example, How long do ETCs exist before they go extinct? Is space travel enormously difficult and expensive or is it just very difficult? Do ETCs have a psychology similar enough to ours to make them want to communicate? How would they communicate, using what sort of medium?--even: would we recognize a communication from an ETC if we received one?
The answer to these questions and many others is, we don't know. But it's fun to speculate; and in speculating at least we can eliminate many conceptual and logical errors that might crop up. Furthermore such speculations expand the mind and allow the imagination a greater range. In direct contrast to Webb I think there's only the smallest chance that we are alone. Amazing how people can come to such divergent conclusions from the same evidence!
For such answers as, They are so advanced that they have no interest in communicating with us, and They are so into their own self-constructed pleasure-enhancing virtual existence that they care not to look outward, etc., Webb has a ready response. For such answers to solve the Fermi paradox, he says, they have to apply to every single ETC. Surely, he posits, not all ETCs would have such a psychology. But, by taking all such solutions and playing an elimination game similar to the one Webb plays on pages 237-239, we can reverse his conclusion and eliminate all existing ETCs as non-communicative for one reason or another, arriving at the grand conclusion that we are not alone and that there are indeed a whole bunch of ETCs out there.
I wish I had the space to address some other Stephen Webb arguments that I think are faulty, but perhaps just one more will be suggestive. On page 229, while arguing that only humans have symbolic language, he relates an experiment in which a dolphin learns to operate an apparatus to release food. The dolphin is timed. Then the scientists close that dolphin off and release a second dolphin into the pool with the apparatus. The first dolphin can send signals to the second dolphin. The scientists then time how long it takes for the second dolphin to learn to work the apparatus. They discover that it takes the second dolphin on average just as long as it did the first. Webb writes: We can conclude from this that the first dolphin was unable to tell the second dolphin how the apparatus worked.
Well, maybe. But replace the dolphins with humans, and the reward of food with hundred dollar bills, and perhaps we might conclude that humans are also unable to communicate how the apparatus worked!
Bottom line: for SETI enthusiasts and anyone interested in the prospect of extraterrestrial life, this is a book, despite its flaws, not to be missed.
--Dennis Littrell, author of The World Is Not as We Think It Is 0387955011 I started this book with a sense of foreboding. The subtitle is 'Seventy-five solutions to the Fermi paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life'. Any premise based on giving 75 different answers to the same question - in this case, effectively 'Where are the aliens?' - sounds like a trainspotter of a book. A title that is obsessed with collecting every possible viewpoint, over and above any value that can be gained from reading it. However, the first proper chapter, giving some background to the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and the 'where is everybody' paradox that it is named after him, reassured me hugely, as it was entertaining and well written.
I can honestly say that if Stephen Webb had continued in this vein and had written a book about the Fermi paradox and its possible solutions in the same narrative style as his chapter on Fermi and the origins of the paradox, I would have given this book four to five stars. That chapter demonstrated just how well Webb can write. But the format of 75 'different' solutions lets him down. By about the 12 mark, the whole thing was getting a trifle samey. And by solution 20, I was skip reading, searching for interesting bits.
The book has a lovely range and covers many fascinating topics - for example, it went from Bayes' theorem to stone axe manufacturing in a few pages - but the constant return to yet another solution to the Fermi paradox gets, frankly, boring. Structured as a continuous narrative, the content of this book would have been excellent, but as 75 bitty 'solutions' it just doesn't work very well.
This proved particularly irritating when Webb goes through all the different reasons why life could be rare in the universe, and says at the end of each, over and over variants on 'but of itself, this is probably not enough to justify the conclusion.' I found myself wanting to throw the book against the wall and scream 'But why should it be taken by itself? Why not combine the solutions?' .... And then Webb cheats and does exactly that in his own 'solution', number 75.
This was so near an excellent piece of popular science (I'm not really sure why it's part of Springer's 'Science and Fiction' series, as it merely references ideas from SF, but the majority of popular science books do that), just let down by the structure. I'd also say that the publisher is making a mistake pricing the book as if it were an academic title: it's more expensive than any normal hardback popular science title, let alone a paperback. 0387955011 Very very fun. All the science-based speculations that I love about science fiction, without the misogynist plots. 0387955011 Point a decent-sized radio antenna at any part of the sky, or just look up at it all on a cloudless night: not a trace of aliens - doesn't that strike you as odd?
It struck physicist Enrico Fermi as very odd: if the laws of nature are universal, working in the same way all over the galaxy, and have produced the Earth, life (and us) here, then they should have produced Earths (and 'us') everywhere. Worse, our solar system may be more than four billion years old, but the Universe itself is more than thirteen billion - so there should have been Earths out there with their versions of us for aeons already. Yet here we are, apparently alone. This has become known as the Fermi Paradox - in Fermi's own words, 'Where is everybody?' - and the more we learn, the more mystifying it becomes: the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence programme has been running for decades now, without detecting even a single stray signal, while at the same time the latest space probes are discovering new planets by the truck-load.
In fact, this isn't a full-blown paradox at all, just a flat contradiction between what, on the one hand, we believe to be the way the Universe works (its laws of nature, science as a rationale, reason itself for that matter) and, on the other, the Universe we seem to be living in. One of these must be incomplete or even wrong in some way. Perhaps the former; to give just one example, perhaps there are unknown phenomena at work, vast cataclysms which periodically sterilize the entire cosmos and set the clock of life back to zero each time - if that were the case then we would, in a sense, be the first. Or maybe it's the latter: Fermi's 'everybody' are all out there, but for some reason don't want us to know that.
This book is a compendium of fifty possible explanations of that sort, from the stolidly scientific to the wildly speculative - and flawed: many contain assumptions about alien psychology for instance (just one alien civilization behaving differently from the rest would flood the galaxy with radio transmissions or speeding spaceships). It's a thorough round-up which also reminded me just how odd all this is; any way you look at it, that silent sky may be the single most important fact our civilization has. 0387955011
FROM THE REVIEWS: �Webb offers coherent, understandable, and sometimes humorous coverage of a diverse range of topics. He provides readers with non-trivial insights into research fields they may not have encountered previously . . . I think everyone who has ever considered the possibility that other intelligent civilizations exist elsewhere within our galaxy will enjoy Where Is Everybody? They will find much to agree with, and much to argue about, in this very accessible volume.� �SCIENCE During a Los Alamos lunchtime conversation that took place more than 50 years ago, four world-class scientists agreed, given the size and age of the Universe, that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations simply had to exist. The sheer numbers demanded it. But one of the four, the renowned physicist and back-of-the-envelope calculator Enrico Fermi, asked the telling question: If the extraterrestrial life proposition is true, he wondered, Where IS everybody? In this lively and thought-provoking book, Stephen Webb presents a detailed discussion of the 50 most cogent and intriguing answers to Fermi's famous question, divided into three distinct groups: - Aliens are already here among us. Here are answers ranging from Leo Szilard's suggestion that they are already here, and we know them as Hungarians, to the theorists who claim that aliens built Stonehenge and the Easter Island statues. - Aliens exist, but have not yet communicated. The theories in this camp range widely, from those who believe we simply don't have the technologies to receive their signals, to those who believe the enormities of space and time work against communication, to those who believe they're hiding from us. - Aliens do not exist. Here are the doubters' arguments, from the Rare Earth theory to the author's own closely argued and cogently stated skepticism. The proposed solutions run the gamut from the crackpot to the highly serious, but all deserve our consideration. The varieties of arguments -- from first-rate scientists, philosophers and historians, and science fiction authors -- turn out to be astonishing, entertaining, and vigorous intellectual exercises for any reader interested in science and the sheer pleasure of speculative thinking. Stephen Webb is a physicist working at the Open University in England and the author of Measuring the Universe. If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life