The Contact Paradox
Challenging our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
What will happen if (perhaps when) humanity makes contact with another civilisation on a different planet?
In 1974 a message was beamed towards the stars by the giant Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, a brief blast of radio waves designed to alert extraterrestrial civilisations to our existence. Of course, we don't know if such civilisations really exist. For the past six decades a small cadre of researchers have been on a quest to find out, as part of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, SETI has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, but with more than a hundred billion stars in our Galaxy alone to search, the odds of quick success are stacked against us.
The silence from the stars is prompting some researchers to transmit more messages into space, in an effort to provoke a response from any civilisations out there that might otherwise be staying quiet. However, the act of transmitting raises troubling questions about the process of contact.
In The Contact Paradox, author Keith Cooper looks at how far SETI has come since its modest beginnings, and where it is going, by speaking to the leading names in the field and beyond. SETI forces us to confront our nature in a way that we seldom have before – where did we come from, where are we going, and who are we in the cosmic context of things? This book considers the assumptions that we make in our search for extraterrestrial life, and explores how those assumptions can teach us about ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut author Cooper, the editor of Astronomy Now and Astrobiology Magazine, lays out the possibilities, good and bad, humanity faces in contemplating alien contact in his intriguing study. He opens in 1967, with an epochal astronomical discovery. While searching for radio signals from quasars, PhD student Jocelyn Bell picked up a powerful pulse that repeated every 1.3 seconds. The signal turned out to be from a spinning neutron star a pulsar rather than "little green men," but scientists began to think more seriously about the consequences of contacting extraterrestrials. For instance, to what degree might they share humans' innate "proclivity for altruism toward individuals that we're not related to," as opposed to another widespread human trait xenophobia? And even if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, would humans recognize it as such? Cooper observes that "if technology is not ubiquitous with intelligence," then the dominant current model for detecting extraterrestrial sentience, via radio signals and other signs of technological activity, might all be in vain. Exploring these and many other concerns with concise and approachable writing, Cooper crafts a worthwhile popular science work about questions that, as scientists continually improve the human capacity for gathering information about the rest of the universe, are becoming increasingly important.
