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Book Recommendation: The Aliens Are Coming!


Barwickian

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Ben Miller, The Aliens Are Coming! The Extraordinary Science Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe (Little, Brown, 2016)

 

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(Amazon UK link - Amazon US link)

Note: this is not a critical review - it's a recommendation.

Ben Miller is better known as a comedian and film and TV actor (notably one half of the British duo Armstrong and Miller). Less well known is that he was studying for his PhD in physics when his comedy career took off.

The Aliens Are Coming! is a popular science book looking at the chances of intelligent life developing on other planets, and our chances of communicating them. Along the way, it introduces and explains what Miller describes as "some ravishingly beautiful science".

It hits some of the usual notes - the Drake Equations and the Fermi Paradox - but doesn't overemphasise them. It goes rather deeper into quantum mechanics, cosmology and the four basic forces than I'd expected, but explains them well.

 

Miller's methodology tends to follow the Drake equation - how unusual is our solar system, what are the chances of life developing on a similar world, or on a radically different world, and so on - but explores each part in extraordinary detail.

 

It isn't a scientific paper; Miller aims to show that alien life is quite possible, even probable, but he does highlight some difficult areas, where an unlikely event has to occur for his reasoning to stand (notably the development of complex cells, when an archaeon at a  bacterium). He relies fairly heavily on convergent evolution to demonstrate that aside from the one event there are multiple examples of particular abilities (including intelligence) developing on Earth.

There are plenty of concepts I wasn't aware of from older books on aliens (such as classificaton of languages according to Zipf's equation - and the fact that dolphin whistles also fit Zipf).

There's a ton of useful information for worldbuilders (for example, if life originates in undersea volcanic vents, then molten core worlds are essential; the Earth is one the small side for a long-duration molten core, and bigger worlds with plate tectonics will tend to have lower mountains and shallower seas - the latter being ideal for complex life.)

Although it predates the Trappist-1 discovery, it anticipates it.

If you're interested in cosmology, SETI or worldbuilding with up-to-date science, it's a must-have.
 

I had the chance to see Miller talking on the subject at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai last weekend, and to briefly chat with him afterwards. Not only is he a clever chap, he's also a hellaciously nice one (a view formed not just by my own meeting, but that of a friend involved in organising the festival).

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm reading this now, and I second the recommendation.

 

Incidentally, Miller isn't the first to discussion I've read of Earth possibly having a "shadow biosphere" of microbes based on a different biochemistry. Feinberg and Shapiro raised the possibility in their 1980 book Life Beyond Earth. They even discussed it with the Nobel-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg, who proposed some experiments that might reveal such alternate-biochemistry life. Obviously, such alt-life has not been discovered -- but Lederberg suggested that some of the experiments would be well within the capabilities of, say, any junior college science department.

 

Dean Shomshak

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