The eerie silence
In this mind-expanding book, Paul Davies, astrobiologist and chairman of the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup and, refocuses the search, challenging existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if it does.
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- His book on SETI "The Eerie Silence" is fantastic btw. I don't agree with every assertion, but it covers the subject in amazing detail. I learned a lot.
- The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies.
It does cover a history of SETI, but goes into a lot of the theory that is generally beyond a bit of what I've seen discussed before in popsci. I thought I knew the subject very well, but learned a lot of new things.
- Paul Davies (head of SETI) has a fantastic book called "The Eerie Silence". It was the first time in years that I had read a good science book written for the layman that taught me not only a lot of new scientific ideas, history I didn't know about, and made me think about humanity in a new light. I really can't recommend it enough.
Ok, so he makes an argument that made me put down the book (ok 17 year old me) and really ponder the statement. It was his belief that "all biological life is transistory". Of course we have no other intelligent life outside of earth to compare against, but it kind of makes sense in a completely unproven kind of way. A species develops as biological and eventually transcends to machine. At that point, you would be far more intelligent (maybe) and the only requirement for society would be lots and lots of energy. You would essentially be a mind floating around in infinite cyber space experiencing everything there is to experience. You could travel to the stars if you would like (no cryogenics or food necessary), but honestly...why would you want to?
The book mostly sticks to scientific fact and covers a lot of SETI history, but there are many additional topics like this that are thought provoking.
Some of my friends were horrified by this (end of biological humanity assuming it is ever possible), but to me...it is the most logical progression for humanity to become more than what it currently is. These flesh bodies cause us to die far too early and our brains can probably only be enhanced so much.
- Man you just hit the nail on the head.
In a similar vein, I love documentaries and I learned much as a child that way. I find that they are way too basic now and often repeat things I've seen/known for years. This is needed for other kids of course, but as an adult the only stuff is really basic or so advanced that it is actual work to make it through (tough after a rough week at work).
One of my favorite examples of finding the middle ground is in dealing with SETI. I love the subject and have seen numerous documentaries on it over the years that cover what they're doing from 50,000 feet. Paul Davies is the lead at SETI and I read his book "The Eerie Silence" and it was really awesome. It perfectly found the middle ground between a documentary which has to be ok for children and a textbook on the subject. Paul Davies is kind of to SETI what Alan Kay is to computing in some ways as someone with deep experience in the field and lots of philosophical thoughts on the subject. His writing is really clear though (I love Kay, but don't have a strong enough computing, historical computing, math, or biology background to keep up with a lot of his writing). Two others that stand out to me are the classic "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking that blew my mind as a kid and the equally good, but lesser known "Black Holes and Time Warps" by Kip Thorne which made an excellent follow up book that gives a good high level appreciation which would likely be helpful for anyone planning to study those subjects in college at a rigorous mathematical level. Kip's book is also funny. There is a picture of Stephen Hawking delivering him a years subscription to a magazine (I think it might have been lewd in nature) for losing a bet to Kip over whether Cygnus A would have a black hole I think. As a highschool student I wrote to him with some career questions and he was kind enough to respond! Max Tegmark has a book "Our Mathematical Universe" which covers two parts: one on why we might be part of a simulation, and the first part which is like a condensed cosmology lesson from A to Z. He had a big part in several big discoveries and hearing the play by play is gripping. He was apparently a pretty gifted coder, so he got tasked with a lot of the data analysis and therefore he and his first wife were among the first to see the actual results of these big experiments. Code by Petzold is also an amazing tour de force if you want to understand computers.
- You'll want to read "The Eerie Silence" by SETI lead Paul Davies who's job is to think of this stuff.
The book covers many many possibilities for how a civilization might try to communicate or get the word out from Von Neumann probes to leaving something in our DNA, which could easily last multiple millennia to monuments...etc etc. It also covers the search for life elsewhere like looking for reverse chirality DNA on Mars (basically there is no reason all DNA found on earth should curl one way and finding DNA that goes the other way strongly suggests it didn't come from us).
- My apologies on the very late response, but if you haven't read it, I recommend the book The Eerie Silence. Covers a lot of this general idea.
https://smile.amazon.com/Eerie-Silence-Renewing-Search-Intel...
