| If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens... WHERE IS EVERYBODY? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life Stephen Webb New York: Copernicus Books, 2002 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-387-95501-1 | 288p. | HC/BWI | $27.50 | |
| Page 9: | "Two weeks after arriving in New York, news reached Fermi that German and Austrian scientists had demonstrated nuclear fission." |
| S/B "Fermi heard the news". |
| Page 95: | "Infrared, microwaves, and radio waves have progressively lower frequencies, reaching down to 108 Hz." |
| They reach far lower. Standard AM broadcasts go down to 5.4 x 105 Hz, and ADF is below that. Over-the-horizon radar. Scientific uses, and hamming as well. |
| Page 101: | Caption to Figure 36: "Despite their appearance in the movie Contact, the telescope only rarely listens for broadcasts from extraterrestrials." |
| Error of number: S/B "Despite its appearance". |
| Page 105: | "Zuckerman and Palmer examined 700 nearby stars and logged ten signals that could have been artificial." |
| Contradiction: Note 128 says 600 stars and 11 signals. |
| Page 108: | "(The radiation from powerful military radars, and the signals that astronomers bounce off Venus and Mars to map the topography of those planets, has more chance of being detected over interstellar distances..." |
| Error of number: S/B "have more chance". |
| Page 117: | "If this is correct, then a fascinating question arises: what would the mathematics of an ETC be like? (Their symbols, of course, would be different; but that is not important.) Would they have developed the prime number theorem; the min-max theorem; the four-color theorem? If their evolutionary history were completely different from our own, then perhaps not. Why should it? If they evolved in an environment where variables changed continuously rather than discretely, then perhaps they would not have invented the concept of an integer." |
| Error of number: S/B "Why should they?". |
| Page 146: | "He considered the far future of the Universe, and was lead to a concept not unlike Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point." |
| Elemental typo: S/B "was led to". (If publishers would make sure their editors iron out such problems, I'm sure their books would sulfur more.) |
| Pages 159-60: | The Titius-Bode Law is mentioned twice, but not explained — not even in Webb's Notes. |
| This is the "Law" of orbit sizes in our solar system; it says that as you move outward from the Sun, the radius of each planet's orbit is twice the previous one. |
| Page 164: | "It is primarily at crises points, when for some reason the environment changes, that evolution works quickly..." |
| Part-of-speech error: S/B "at crisis points". |
| Page 186: | "Although collisions Solar System objects were common, such cataclysmic Moon-forming collisions may have been scarce;..." |
| Missing word: S/B "collisions with Solar System objects". |
| Page 208: | "...(and passed on either through sex or through parthogenesis)..." |
| Spelling: S/B "parthenogenesis". |
| Page 211: | "There might be several hurdles to overcome before animals species can flourish, ..." |
| Typo: S/B "before animal species can flourish". |
| Page 225: | "For example, there is rule for forming the regular past tense of an English verb ..." |
| Missing word: S/B "there is a rule". |
| Page 238: | "Step 5 starts with half a million (5x105) planets were life could arise. Webb estimates 20% of those undergo asteroid strikes or other disasters that take them out of the running. He says 105 planets remain for Step 6." |
| Math error: S/B "4x105". This one deserves a Mea Culpa. I don't know where that "correction" came from. Dr. Webb's math is fine. |
| Page 261: | "The two emperors mentioned here were Hongwu (1328-1398) and Yongle (1359-1424); ..." |
| How can the emperors' terms overlap? My guess: It's a typo. |
| Page 267: | "The novels mentioned in the text were Integral Trees by Larry Niven and Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward." |
| Nit: The text only describes the setting where each novel takes place; and here the titles appear in the wrong order. Integral Trees should be last. |
Webb (and/or his editor) made a few mistakes. But his heart is definitely in the right place. From page 116 (emphasis in original; number error corrected):
Some mathematicians, though, argue strongly from an anti-Platonic stance. They claim mathematics is not some sort of idealized essence independent of human consciousness, but is rather the invention of human minds. It is a social phenomenon, part of human culture. (This is a rather brave thing for professional mathematicians to propose, because superficially the proposal can sound like the lunatic ravings of those postmodernist critics who denounce science as the arbitrary construction of dead white male Europeans.) The anti-Platonists contend that mathematical objects are created by us, according to the needs of daily life. It may be, they argue, that evolution has hard-wired an "arithmetic module" into our brains. Neuroscientists even have a possible location for this module: the inferior parietal cortex, an as yet poorly understood area of the brain. |
And, on page 17, he taught me a new word: Subitizing. It means, roughly, to perceive the number of objects in a scene without consciously counting them. The process works for up to six objects.
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