Book of the week: The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)

Astrobiologist Paul Davies is tired of waiting for some alien to broadcast a shout-out to us earthlings, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Fifty years after a West Virginia astronomer first pointed a radio telescope toward the heavens, hoping to pick up a message from space, Davies is breaking with his colleagues at the inter­national organization known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). He points out, among other things, that their satellite-dish approach is batty. “An interesting thinker about nearly every aspect” of the hunt, Davies won’t rule out the possibility that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. But he doubts that advanced ­beings would be communicating using 20th-century broadcast technologies that humanity itself is already outgrowing.

If Davies had his way, every scientist in the world would spend at least some time scouting for aliens, said Matthew Riesz in the London Times Higher Education Supplement. Some of his suggestions “sound concrete and practical”: He wants less sky-watching and more efforts to detect whether life on Earth was just a one-off stroke of luck. But Davies’ hypotheses get “stranger and stranger” as his book proceeds, something he himself acknowledges. He wants geologists to consider whether they’ve ever seen hints that, in prehistory, an alien culture may have drilled for minerals, and for biologists to muse on the possibility that visitors have encoded messages into our genome. Such speculation “costs nothing,” he says, but reduces the chance that crucial evidence will escape notice.

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Davies waits until the penultimate page to finally reveal the true limits of his own expectations, said David Papineau in the London Observer. Though “his level-headedness is positively refreshing,” he seems far too pessimistic when he worries that the spontaneous creation of even rudimentary life on Earth might have been an unrepeatable fluke. The truly important question is how likely it is that high-level intelligence has developed elsewhere. Davies, curiously, pays little attention to how vast an evolutionary leap was needed to go from crow or even chimpanzee smarts to human-level brainpower. Given the actual odds, “there are probably plenty of dumb animals scattered across the universe, but nobody worth talking to.”