If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

by Stephen Webb

Book Overview

FROM THE REVIEWS: Webb offers coherent, understandable, and sometimes humorous coverage of a diverse range of topics. He provides readers with non-trivial insights into research fields they may not have encountered previously . . . I think everyone who has ever considered the possibility that other intelligent civilizations exist elsewhere within our galaxy will enjoy Where Is Everybody? They will find much to agree with, and much to argue about,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387955011
• ISBN13: 9780387955018
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Copernicus Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Is there intelligent life in the Galaxy?

Are there any civilizations in the Galaxy that are sending out radio signals besides us? If so, why haven't we detected them? Why hasn't such a civilization visited us? After all, our Galaxy has been around for billions of years, but it would take only a few million years to populate it. Webb is thorough in covering possible answers to these questions. Perhaps they are already here! Maybe they call themselves Hungarians. Or perhaps they exist but haven't communicated with us. The author discusses this all at great length. And next, he gets into the most obvious possibility: maybe they don't exist. Maybe we're the only ones. Or maybe we're just the first of many. Webb discusses the possibility that there are several difficult steps (say, 12) on the path from abiotic material to intelligent life. Maybe we'd be the only lucky ones who made it through all twelve! Actually, I think this argument is mildly garbled by Webb, and that the best way for us to be the only ones is for there to be exactly one very unlikely step that could happen at any time (like winning a lottery). There are other reasons why we might be the only ones. Perhaps there are unusual properties of our part of the Galaxy or of our planet that make our odds much better. There is a discussion of "habitable zones," both of the Galaxy and of stellar systems. And there is a discussion of hazards to life: another area where we humans may have been luckier than we might imagine. Webb also writes about how life may have originated on Earth in the first place. At the end of the book, the author gives his own "solution" to the problem. Basically, it is that roughly one planet in the Galaxy has communicating life. Actually, that looks like a very interesting and plausible guess. But he also estimates that there are 10,000 planets in the Galaxy with complex life. Or is it 4,000,000? You see, he sloppily made three arithmetic mistakes in his calculation: factors of 10, 10, and 4. Who proofread this book? Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book and recommend it.

A Book that Celebrates the Pleasure of Speculative Thinking

+++++ As the author, physicist Stephen Webb states, "The purpose of this book is to present and discuss 50 proposed solutions to Fermi's [Paradox]." Webb also states Enrico Fermi's (1901 to 1954) paradox (which he uttered in 1950) more eloquently as "the contradiction between the apparent absence of aliens, and the common expectation that we should see evidence of their existence...[in the form of] their craft or their probes or their signals [or even their artifacts]. We should not have to wait for evidence of their existence--the evidence should already be here." This contradiction has a greater significance when the famous Drake equation is used to calculate the possible number of advanced civilizations in our Galaxy. Webb does a calculation based on this equation (before he delves into the solutions to Fermi's paradox) and gets a number of one million. (The late Dr. Carl Sagan did the same thing in his book "Cosmos" (1980) and came up with a number of ten million.) Thus: "The Galaxy should be swarming with extraterrestrial civilizations. Yet we see no sign of them. We should already know of their existence, but we do not. Where is everybody? Where are they? This is the Fermi Paradox." This book (that has many black-and-white pictures as well as diagrams) is for the general, educated reader. "One of the beauties of the Fermi Paradox is that it can be appreciated without the need for any [science or] mathematics beyond an understanding of exponential notation." Forty-nine (specific) solutions (which are not intended to be exhaustive) are presented in chapters three, four, and five of this eight chapter book. These solutions come from scientists in several different scientific fields and even science fiction authors. As the author says, "[These are] my favorite [specific] solutions to the paradox; not all of them are independent, and sometimes I revisit a solution in another guise...In the discussion [of each solution] I will try to be as even-handed as possible, even if I disagree with the solution (which I often do)." The way these specific solutions are organized is around three general categorical answers. These general answers that are for optimists, SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) enthusiasts, and pessimists respectively are as follows: (1) Chapter three contains 8 specific solutions based on the general answer that THEY ARE HERE (2) Chapter four contains 22 specific solutions based on the general answer that THEY EXIST BUT HAVE NOT YET COMMUNICATED (3) Chapter five contains 19 specific solutions based on the general answer that THEY DO NOT EXIST. For example, someone might ask Fermi's question of "Where is everybody?" Picking one of the three general categorical answers presented above, a general answer might be "They exist but have not yet communicated." One of the 22 specific solutions presented in this book based on this general answer is that "We have not listened [for their signals] long eno

A fun book

This is a terrific, fun book to read. The author discusses 50 solutions to the Fermi paradox (you know the one: "if advanced alien civilizations exist, then why don't we see them?"), and does so very wittily. I didn't agree with all the arguments given in the book, but it many ways that's the whole point: this is the kind of topic you can have great fun arguing about. It captured my imagination, and it made me think - which is what I look for in books.My only criticism of the book is the awkward referencing system it uses. Numbers in the main text point to a "Notes and Further Reading" chapter (these notes are themselves fun to read!), but then numbers in this chapter point to a "References" chapter. It got confusing for a while.

Examining their navels?

This is the most up-to-date and thorough discussion of the Fermi Paradox that I have read. Stephen Webb examines all the popular solutions as well as some esoteric ones, giving us considerable background on each along with the benefit of his knowledge on a wide range of relevant subjects including microbiology, plate tectonics, evolution, intelligence, language, philosophy, as well as astronomy and cosmology. And then he gives his solution: we are alone.That was Fermi's solution of course, and it is a popular one; however I don't think that Webb comes anywhere near to making a convincing case; and at any rate he is somewhat equivocal about whether his answer applies to the entire universe or to just the galaxy. It is clear that his answer applies only to life as we know it, having a carbon based biochemistry and a cellular structure. My feeling is that intelligent life forms may evolve from some other chemical basis or even from some use of energy and matter we know nothing about.On pages 237 to 239 Webb presents his argument that we are the only extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) in the galaxy by a process of elimination, i.e., life must be on a planet within both a galactic habitable zone (GHZ) and a solar continuously habitable zone (CHZ) around the right kind of star; must avoid cosmic disasters like supernovae; must have the right kind of moon, Jupiter, and plate tectonics; must evolve beyond single cells; must develop tool use and language, etc. He ends up sifting out everything except us, and the only reason he doesn't sift us out is that he has set us aside since we actually exist!This is close to sophistry, perhaps, but it has been argued before. I might call it the Fallacy of Elimination by Unknown Probabilities about Matters that May or May Not Be Essential. Putting that aside, consider this: If we extrapolate from what we know (as opposed to any speculation) about the existence of life in just our own galaxy, we should expect on average--at the very least--one ETC per galaxy. Wow. Far from being alone, this suggests more than 100 billion other ETCs are out there, although we are not likely to ever communicate with them.One of the things this book demonstrates, as others have before (see especially, Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee's Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe [2000], which Webb acknowledges as influential), is that when you're dealing with so little concrete information in such a vastness, it is impossible to be entirely convincing one way or the other. The conclusion in Rare Earth, with which Webb concurs, is that life is common in the universe, but intelligent life is rare. I agree substantially with this, but my "rare" is perhaps larger than their "rare."Some of the familiar but crucial questions considered here were addressed in the excellent Extraterrestrials: Where Are They? (1995) edited by Ben Zuckerman and Michael H. Hart. For example, How long do ETCs exist before they go extinct?

Billions Of Channels And Nothing's On?!?

Four guys walk into the caf at Los Alamos for lunch and start discussing extraterrestrial intelligence. They decide that life, intelligence, and conquering the galaxy shouldn't be that hard. Then one of them asks, "where is everybody?" Far from being the beginning of a bad nerd joke, this lunchtime discussion actually took place in the summer of 1950 and Enrico Fermi really did ask the now famous Fermi Question. The discussion and question led to the Fermi Paradox: if the universe is as old as it is, and if the Earth isn't the oldest planet with intelligent life, and conquering the galaxy is as easy as it seems, then where the heck are they?Physicist Stephen Webb does an admirable job of discussing some possible answers to the Fermi Paradox in If The Universe Is Teeming With Aliens...Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions To The Fermi Paradox And The Problem Of Extraterrestrial Life. It's a tough job, even for a fan of the Fermi Paradox like Webb, since it means being well versed in a wide range of subjects AND it means thinking like an alien intelligence. Webb describes and critiques 49 of his favorite solutions, starting with They Are Here And They Call Themselves Hungarians, and then throws in a fiftieth solution of his own design. The solutions are subdivided into three sections: 1) They Are Here, 2) They Exist But Have Not Yet Communicated, and 3)They Do Not Exist. The book is set up so that after reading Chapters 1 and 2, a person can read the solutions as they wish. Some basic math and science skills are required, but the book should be accessible to a wide reading audience. Albeit not a perfect book, I enjoyed reading Where Is Everybody?, especially since it made me think A LOT! This is NOT a book about flying saucers, alien abductions, and forced interspecific sex, so if that's what you're looking for, STAY AWAY from this book. Besides appealing to folks interested in the question of life elsewhere, it should appeal to any person with wide-ranging interests [both the natural sciences and the social sciences] who wants to exercise the full range of their brain power. For serial readers like me, read this one in combination with Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and What Does A Martian Look Like? by Cohen and Stewart for a mind expanding [and exploding] experience.The answer to the question "is there life elsewhere?" is profound no matter which way it is answered. I continue to run my SETI@home screensaver and hope. It would be terrible if there were billions of channels and nothing is on.