Vol. 25 No. 5 · 6 March 2003
pages 19-20 | 2896 words
Forget the Klingons
James Hamilton-Paterson
- Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
Ebury, 369 pp, £17.99, September 2002, ISBN 0 09 187927 2
- XTL: Extraterrestrial Life and How to Find It by Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin
Weidenfeld, 191 pp, £12.99, August 2002, ISBN 1 84188 193 7
In the middle of the 19th century the prevailing scientific view of the abyssal ocean held that it was a vast body of water with a uniform temperature of 4°C. With no variation of temperature there could be no convection currents, hence no circulation of dissolved oxygen and suspended food particles. The abyss was stagnant, a body of water under massive pressure, barely warmer than freezing and utterly without light. Thus, reasoned the scientists (influenced, no doubt, by human physiology and the Book of Genesis), it could not conceivably support life. The Manx naturalist Edward Forbes coined the word ‘azoic’ to describe this self-evidently lifeless zone. By the 1870s he and other oceanographers were eating their words as improved sampling technology retrieved abundant evidence that, in cheerful defiance of human preconceptions, even the deepest abyss was teeming with life.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 25 No. 7 · 3 April 2003
From Alan Penny
James Hamilton-Paterson's literary approach to the search for extra-terrestrial life (LRB, 6 March) – typified by the use of a trivial quotation from Calvin and Hobbes in dealing with the complex Fermi Paradox (if they exist, why haven't they contacted us?) – provides little information on the actual progress now being made. The search for signs of life on Mars, on the Jupiter moon Europa, and on other planets orbiting nearby stars is well underway, in both Europe and America, and is coupled with a deepening understanding of the origin of life on Earth. In addition, thanks to the privately funded Allen Telescope Array and the prospective Square Kilometre Array, we are near to being able to detect radio emissions similar to our own from enough targets to have a chance of finding a civilisation passing through the (presumably short) phase of radio-emitting technology.
Alan Penny
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, Oxfordshire
Vol. 25 No. 9 · 8 May 2003
From Jonathan Bland
Alan Penny (Letters, 3 April) says that James Hamilton-Paterson's quotation from Calvin and Hobbes – 'sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us' – is a 'trivial' way of 'dealing with the complex Fermi Paradox (if they exist, why haven't they contacted us?)'. Presumably, since the words are no more trivial than Penny's own, he thinks they're trivial because they appear in a comic. Art Spiegelman's far from trivial work on the pages following Hamilton-Paterson's review should have put paid to that idea. Penny goes on to enthuse about the technological advances which mean we'll soon be able to pick up radio waves 'from enough targets to have a chance of finding a civilisation passing through the (presumably short) phase of radio-emitting technology'. A pretty slim chance, surely? And even if we picked them up, how would we be able to recognise them? Besides which, any intelligent alien life-form sufficiently like us for us to recognise it would presumably be able to recognise us, too. And anything smart enough to intercept and understand our satellite TV news would also no doubt be smart enough to keep well clear. Which takes us back to Calvin and Hobbes.
Jonathan Bland
Southampton
