The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence2001

Is there intelligent life out there? If so, where are they and do we really want to meet them? These are the questions examined by Lamb (philosophy and bioethics, U. of Birmingham) He evaluates the competing theories of the practitioners of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and their skeptic critics, including the Drake equation which optimistically predicts thousands of advance civilizations and Fermi's paradox which assumes that if there were civilizations capable of advance extrasolar communication, we would have heard from them already. Also explored are the methodologies that the SETI crowd are utilizing in their search for alien intelligence, including the construction of radio beacons and the search for Dyson spheres. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR