Is there silence because extraterrestrials simply do not exist? Are the conditions for the emergence of life so far-fetched, so ludicrously improbable that it happened only once, on one planet orbiting one star in just one galaxy during the whole 13.7-billion-year lifetime of the universe? Or is the universe humming with life, but humming so quietly that we cannot hear it? This improbable burden could explain why The Eerie Silence may not be his most thrilling book, but is certainly one of his most thoughtful: there is hardly an aspect of the great Seti puzzle that he does not address, in clear, almost laconic vernacular. He is chairman of the Seti post-detection task group, a little committee of rationalists prepared to confront one of the most intoxicating and terrifying challenges of all time: if we do hear from ET, Davies and colleagues will be the first to know. Paul Davies is a cosmologist who turned to the problem of life in the cosmos at least 15 years ago: this is, on my count, his fourth book on the theme. The sound of extraterrestrial life is the sound of silence. And since April 1960 the astronomer Frank Drake and his colleagues in Seti, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have been listening for signals from those other, so-far invisible planets that surely must be orbiting those stars that are strewn across 100,000 light years of space.Īnd what have they heard? The random fizz and splutter of the accidental noise from pulsars and quasars, from hot gas and cold dust and exploding stars: otherwise, nothing. If life spontaneously evolved and intelligence imperfectly flowered on one planet, what about all those other rocky planets? Terrestrial civilisation has been beaming microwave messages into space for 50 years, in the form of Coronation Street and I Love Lucy, Dr Who and Battlestar Galactica. Here is the other half of the same problem: everywhere beyond Earth, there is silence.
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