Are we alone in the universe? On the countless planets which orbit the innumerable stars captured by the billions of galaxies that comprise this grand experiment we call existence, is there no intelligent life but that which accidentally quickened here on Earth? It is a question of inestimable importance to humanity. For a conclusive answer, one way or the other, would surely set off soul-shattering earthquakes in the religious community, the aftershocks of which would reverberate through every corner of society. In The Eerie Silence, Mr. Davies, a British physicist, endeavors to provide a framework by which his readers can answer this question. But while he succeeds in imbuing his tale with some useful history, and while he enlightens his readers on the thought experiments of various scientists trying to tackle questions of interstellar travel, he fails to pepper his chronicle of the human search for alien life with enough spice to keep the observant reader from realizing that his premise is too weak for a book of some 280 pages.
For 50 years now, the SETI program has labored to locate life elsewhere in the universe. Messages have been sent, the sky has been scoped, and radio spectrums repeatedly and obsessively scanned for any sign of a reply, a glimpse, or a transmission from another species. The result of all of these efforts? Silence... A silence so profound that it has spawned many theories to explain it. Perhaps we are a fluke, the result of thousands of variables lining up to provide the exact and only formula for carbon-based intelligent life. Perhaps civilizations like ours are inherently unstable, lasting only a blink of an eye, rising long enough to exploit their planet's fossil fuels only to burn out before they can take, permanently and comfortably, to the stars. Or perhaps there is a grand, galactic club whose members all agree to withhold the knowledge of their existence from civilizations like ours until we have reached sufficient maturity to join them. Without prejudice, Mr. Davies explores these eideas and more as he lays down the essentials, as we understand them, for the propagation of intelligent life.
If there is life out there, what shape might it take? And how might it communicate with us? Mr. Davies devotes half of his book to answering this second, vital question, venturing into the murky waters of completely theoretical science to discuss how an alien species might spread itself across the cosmos. Would it be achieved through huge, lumbering ships that have simply not reached us yet? Or might they come in millions of tiny ships capable of observing us without being noticed? Fodder for worriers all...
The Eerie Silence does a wonderful job educating the reader on not only the basics of the search for alien life, but the fascinating people who've empowered it and the many struggles they've encountered to fund it. This half of Mr. Davies' effort is a complete success. But his decision to venture so deeply into the pseudo science of how completely theoretical alien civilizations might voyage amongst the stars, and what their ethics might be like, and how they might contact us, lifted his tale out of the comfortable genre of science history and dropped it into the genre of the totally speculative. This decidedly awkward marriage is a stain on what is otherwise a lovely homage to courageous and dedicated scientists who, with barely any support, have devoted themselves to a pursuit as fascinating and possibly life-altering as it is thankless. (3/5 Stars)
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