| BEYOND CONTACT A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations Brian McConnell Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2001 |
Rating: 3.5 Fair |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-596-00037-0 | ||||
| ISBN 0-596-00037-5 | 417pp. | HC/GSI | $24.95 | |
Many books have been written about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI). The recent discoveries about the hardihood of life on Earth, of organic constituents of life in space, and planets circling other stars, have brought forth a spate of new titles — many about the search for microbial life on Mars, but several about SETI.
Brian McConnell's book is unique among them. More handbook than history, it describes the two technologies known to be useful for communicating across interstellar distances (radio and lasers) and then presents a coherent scheme for developing the content of a message we might send — should we wish to announce our presence in some purposeful way.1
But this is not entirely a how-to book. Part 1 discusses the rationale for making the attempt to discover intelligent life on planets of other stars, and briefly describes the history of such efforts. It covers the terms of the Drake Equation in detail, and mentions some alternative formulations, developed more recently.
Part 2 develops the physical basis for the powerful transmitters — both radio and optical — that might be used to launch such messages across the void, and of the receivers and signal-processing equipment needed to detect them. It is here that McConnell's treatment is the weakest, for he apparently has an imperfect grasp of both electronics and astrophysics. More about this below.
He shines in Part 3, where he proposes a method of constructing an easily decoded message. Mr. McConnell is a programmer with a wide variety of telecommunications applications to his credit. This part draws heavily on that background, as the scheme it proposes for communication is basically a programming language. Beginning with the basic constructs — symbols to represent natural numbers, decimal notation and arithmetic operations — he progresses in a logical way through designations for symbols, labels, memory locations, and program instructions to still and motion pictures, simulations of physical processes, and finally abstract concepts. I found scant reasons to fault this portion, except for one or two cases where I feel his imagination overlooked some potential pitfalls.
I suspect Mr. McConnell, in addition to working as a programmer, has also been in the employ of the Dept. of Redundancy Dept. He has a pronounced tendency to explain the same points over and over. His repeated explanations of the Doppler shift are the prime example; see page 133. This even extends to condescension on page 100 when, discussing our scientific understanding of the illumination produced by those distant suns, he helpfully explains, "The light emitted by stars (also known as starlight) carries an incredible amount of information." No! Really??? Starlight, you say... Well, don't that beat all!
The book is unique in another respect too. It collected a record number of post-it notes — an even 100. Though not all these are corrections, I found more grammatical faults and typographical errors than usual. They are listed on a separate page, linked below, along with some conceptual errors.
I found the book fairly interesting to read. However, I cannot recommend it. I am sure there are better treatments of the challenges of creating a scheme for encoding interstellar communications.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.