The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies

Physicist Paul Davies has written a book that is exactly the kind of topic I like to read. The basic question he asks is:

If aliens exist, where are they?The physicist Enrico Fermi asked this question 60 years ago, and it has since come to be known as the “Fermi Paradox”. Given how vast the universe is, and the billions of years that life has had to spread across the cosmos, why have we not found any evidence of alien life?Paul Davies takes a fresh look at this question in his engaging and thoughtful new book, The Eerie Silence.

He goes on to discuss if life on Earth is a simple fluke or there is a possibility that life does exist somewhere out there in the vast Universe.

He also explains that communication may take time:

Even if complex life can be found elsewhere, does that mean it will be intelligent? By “intelligent,” we often mean a species that will use science to investigate the universe. Davies again throws cold water on our assumptions, saying the scientific method is a specific outcome of Greek philosophy and medieval European monotheism. Despite this, Davies gamely uses the Drake Equation to estimate there could be 10,000 civilizations in the galaxy capable at this time of communicating by radio waves.

“At this time” is an important element of his estimate, since a barrier to interstellar communications is not only distance but time. Consider aliens living one thousand light years away. Davies points out that if they were able to see Earth in their telescopes, they would not see us as we are today, but as we were in the year 1010 A.D. - long before we invented radio dishes. And because human radio technology is only about 100 years old, it will take another 900 years for our first signals to reach them.

His writing would suggest he feels we are alone in the Universe but in true scientific form he states:

Still, the fact that we don’t know and may never have the answer about alien life is reason enough to keep searching, says Davies. By stretching our minds to try to envision all the possibilities in our search for aliens, not only may we one day find what we seek, but in the process we also will learn about many other deep and enduring mysteries of the cosmos.

I would like to think that life does exist in the Universe, but then again that is why I love science fiction, and I am not being unrealistic, in my opinion, because nothing has been proven to exclude the fact that life does not exist beyond our galaxy. It is a book that gets you thinking about all the possibilities in life.

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