Confessions Of An Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
Gérald Lizée Comprehensive presentation of human ET searchSeth Shostak's book answered many questions I had about extraterrestrial intelligence and scientific endeavour to find it. The SETI organization became active only a few decades ago: its goal, detect intelligent signals emanating from distant planets surrounding one of the 100 billion stars of our galaxy, the Milky Way, or coming from one of the other 80 billion galaxies in the universe. Using radiotelescopes and optical telescopes, astronomers have pointed their apparatus and listened. Current result: nothing. The SETI endeavour is perceived useless by many politicians and individuals, because it is a waste of money; contrary to some religious beliefs, because it is not written in the Sacred books. It has been very difficult to finance and only United States government has given support from the beginning. Other countries are starting to join the effort since more and more exoplanets are being discovered every day: a few of them could even be lifefriendly and habitable.The SETI project is justified by 3 facts: physical matter and laws have been proven to be the same in all the galaxies of the universe; the cosmos is really big with 100 billion stars in our galaxy and 80 billion galaxies in the universe; using different techniques, the scientists have already found a few thousand planets orbiting other stars.But the most interesting part for me was Seth Shostak's most plausible scenario for ET physical apperance: aliens are most probably immortal sentient machines. He gives them different names: apparatus, cogitating constructions, synthetic sentients, thinking machines, protean intellects, brainiacs, cerebrating hardware, synthetic brains, superior minds, cosmic brainiacs, thinking machines, synthetic intelligence, supersentient, synthetic sentients. ET is an intellectual genius, a quasi-immortal being, improving continuously his abilities and knowledge. He has no biological body and the newbuilt ET knows everything from the moment he is brought to life.I recommand this book to everybody interested in getting an answer to the following fundamental question: are we alone in this vast universe?(less) 13 hours, 31 min ago · delete Most of the issues broached in this book wasn't very new to me. The reason for this is very easy to fathom: I'm a long time listener to the SETI institute podcast that Seth coshosts, "Big Picture Science" aka "Are we alone?". Nevertheless, I found this book very enjoyable. I like Seth's style and wit, but more importantly, the book is written in a engaging fashion about such interesting topics as the history and future of search for aliens in the context of modern astronomy and the current rapid march of technology. Of course, if you've picked up this book, you can be assumed to have an interest in SETI or astronomy in general. In such a case, this book can't be recommended highly enough.
What do You think about Confessions Of An Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2009)?
An interesting look at SETI's past, present, and future.
—Kghartz
Excellent book about the development of radio astronomy.
—inas
I really want to read this book. It sounds interesting.
—Ying
