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Beyond Contact: a Guide to SETI

Posted by michael on from the BEM dept.

Beyond Contact is the definitive guide to human efforts at contacting alien civilizations. Sure, there have been various works that suggest the best way to make contact is to stand out in a cornfield on a dark night, but if you believe hard work and science (and maybe a *cough* data-crunching PCI card) is the way to go, this book will tell you everything you need to know. The author has been interviewed before; that will give you a starting point. Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations author Brian McConnell pages 417 publisher O'Reilly rating 9/10 reviewer michael ISBN 0-596-00037-5 summary the definitive guide to SETI

Some readers may recall what Stephen Hawking said about his book, A Brief History of Time:

"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one famous equation, E=mc2. I hope that this will not scare off half my potential readers."

Hawking was facing the same challenge as Brian McConnell faces in this book. Both are trying to turn advanced knowledge of their field of endeavour (which requires heavy math, heavy astronomy, heavy physics, heavy programming, and so forth) into a work which can be comprehended by lesser beings. McConnell has taken a different path than Hawking - his book has plenty of advanced equations, diagrams, and concepts. McConnell does a reasonable (and often very good) job at trying to bring readers up to speed when he thinks he's going to go over their heads, but it is still not a book for the faint of heart or mathematically-challenged. There are enough equations in the book to bring its readership down to (.5)n -- oh, roughly zero, give or take.

In any case, it's a good book, but technical. You were warned.

The first couple of chapters cover the history of searching for extraterrestrial life, "are we alone?", the nature of intelligence, and similar areas. Drake's Equation is the famous set of fudge-factors that would tell us whether we were likely to find other life forms, if only we knew what the values of the variables were:

N = R * fs * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L

Fill in values for all of those and you'll be famous forever. But what it means, as our knowledge stands now, is that we have no clue at all whether there is likely to be life out there or not. Comforting, isn't it?

The next several chapters cover the technical aspects of communicating over interstellar distances. The electrical engineers in the audience will have a leg up here; everyone else has the opportunity to learn the basics of signal processing and the peculiarities specific to communication across galaxies. Pretty thorough and informative, without being overwhelming.

Finally, the latter half of the book covers the 64,000 lightyear question: what to say? How to communicate with an intelligence where you can't assume even the most basic things in common? Yes, yes, you've probably heard of the idea of starting with the periodic table or basic mathematics and working up. But that's sort of like a dot-com business plan:

  1. Establish Contact
  2. Send Periodic Chart
  3. ....
  4. Communicate!

McConnell fills in the "...." part, and it's obvious that a great amount of thought has been put into it. Pretty quickly McConnell is describing how to send entire self-executing programs (see Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep).

This book is a bit of an oddity. If we're just talking about entertainment reading, it falls short - too technical. If I was grading it as a scientific work, again it would fall short - not technical enough. :) But as far as I know, this is the only work which tries to explain what SETI really is in terms that educated, reasonably bright laymen can understand, and as such, it does a fine job.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Want to see your review here? Check out the book review submisison guidelines! :)

9 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. SETI@Home by jeriqo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't forget to join the Slashdot SETI@Home Team!
    Here is a link with the stats and stuff:

    http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd =team_lookup&name=slashdot

    -J

    --
    Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
    1. Re:SETI@Home by quannump · · Score: 3, Informative

      The real slashdot team has over 2,000 members. The one in your link only has about 550. This is the real team link.

      --

  2. Not right now by cascino · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's little chance the current SETI program will find ET. The problem is that SETI has no dedicated, high-sensitivity telescopes. They simply can't afford it. The best they've been able to do is "piggyback" with other radio astronomy projects and listen in.
    And although this may be unpopular on /., we can thank Microsoft's Paul Allen for donating the $26 million to fund the Allen Telescope Array, to be built in California in the next five years (I think), which should alleviate this problem. It'll be a network of smaller telescope arrays programmed to act as a single, massive radio telescope.

  3. What the Variables Mean by qualera · · Score: 5, Informative

    N = R * fs * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L

    R = the rate of formation of stars in the galaxy

    fs = the fraction of stars that are suitable suns for planetary systems

    fp = the fraction of those stars with planets (thought to be around 1/2)

    ne = the number of "earths" per planetary system i.e., planets suitable for liquid water

    fl = the fraction of those planets where life develops

    fi = the fraction of planets with life where intelligence develops

    fc = the fraction of those planets that achieve technology which releases detectable signals into space

    L = the lifetime of such communicative civilizations

  4. Fermi's objection by s20451 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fermi's objection to the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations goes something like this: It should take a spacefaring civilization about 1-10 million years to colonize a space the size of the galaxy, even without faster than light travel (the idea is exponential growth -- we send two colonies, then they send two colonies each, and so on). Since 10 million years is short with respect to the amount of time the galaxy has existed (10 billion years) and the amount of time that life has existed on Earth (4 billion years), there should be evidence of colonization everywhere, even if there is as few as one advanced civilization. So, where is everybody?

    I'd like to know if the book discusses this. Many SETI researchers are approaching the conclusion that humanity is the most advanced form of life in our own galaxy, at least.

    --
    Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
    1. Re:Fermi's objection by TheSync · · Score: 3, Informative

      Since 10 million years is short with respect to the amount of time the galaxy has existed (10 billion years) and the amount of time that life has existed on Earth (4 billion years), there should be evidence of colonization everywhere, even if there is as few as one advanced civilization. So, where is everybody?

      I think we also need to keep in mind that the majority of metal-rich star formation was 7 billion years ago, so other life forms only have about a 3 billion year head-start on earth, not a 6 billion year head-start.

  5. Re:I've always found it pointless. . . by s20451 · · Score: 3, Informative

    If there are other lifeforms out there, what are the chances that they would be on the same technological level as us?

    Even if they had something more advanced than radio waves (whatever that might be), certainly they would realize that RF is a cheap, simple, robust solution to certain problems -- such as, say, navigational beacons. Even on Earth, with GPS and other hi-tech navigational aids governing the waterways, we still use lighthouses to say "stay away" in the clearest possible language.

    --
    Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
  6. Re:Self-Executing Programs? by invid · · Score: 2, Informative

    I haven't read the book but my guess is that we send the aliens a Turning machine (which can be described completely with ones and zeros) and then give them some programs to feed into it.

    --
    The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
  7. Work Unit Monitor by adamjone · · Score: 2, Informative

    We have installed SETI@Home on most of the machines in our office. We're split on the subject of finding a signal, but we all think it is a nice screen saver. We were interested in keeping track of the progress of the work units on several of the machines (in case they failed to upload) and in keeping track of our user statistics, so I wrote up a little utility which can parse the state.sah files on shares and display the progress. It also polls the SETI@Home website to retrieve our group statistics. It's hosted on Sourceforge and you can download it here.