1. Is
there anybody out there?
Hear the word ‘alien’ and what might spring to mind
is something approaching HG Wells’ vision of a warlike
Martian invader from War of the Worlds. His fantastical
dreams of dumpy aliens sporting octopod tentacles and camouflage
coloured skin have long been inclined to place the topic of
alien life well beyond the realm of intelligent discourse and
into the world of weird and wacky belief.
But no longer. In Are We Alone?,
Martin Rees puts paid to the flights of fantasy and takes
us on a journey of unsettling consequence.
Seth Shostak is one of SETI’s
(Institute for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)
leading investigators. He is utterly convinced that there
is someone out there. The most compelling evidence is simply
in the vast scales of space. There are 10,000 billion billion
stars visible from Earth’s telescopes alone, and a conservative
estimate places orbiting planets around one in ten of them.
Would it not then be very strange if Earth were the only planet
out of so many boggling billions to have been a cradle for
life?
Peter Ward is a paleontologist at
the University of Washington in Seattle. He’s an expert
biologist and not given to inventing weird alien creatures.
But even he has to admit that life elsewhere is more than
likely: ‘When you think there are 400 billion stars
in our galaxy alone, and there are billions of galaxies, we
now think that virtually every star has a planet, more than
one planet, you’re going to have abodes for life almost
everywhere. It’s ridiculous to think it happened on
this planet and this planet alone. Life is definitely out
there.’
| 1 | 2 | 3
| 4 | 5
| 6 | NEXT
PAGE >
|
