Quote:
On 2002-05-08 10:02, ToSeek wrote:
I read the book and thought it was pretty convincing, though I had thought along the same lines for some time.
I understand there's another book out now that debunks some of its conclusions (can't recall the title, though perhaps someone else here will be able to).
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It's called
Life Everywhere and is also a good read. Having read both, I still side closer to the
Rare Earth train of throught, simply because in nature one expects to see a lower number of more complex life forms in any ecosystem, and there are ecosystems that could easily support less complex forms of life but not more complex ones. I found the primary attacks offered by
Life Everywhere against the
Rare Earth hypothesis were of an ad hominem nature, and didn't do much to suggest that intelligent life
is everywhere as opposed to a rare thing.
Ironically, in the last chapter of
Life Everywhere, it states various possibilities regarding what we may find or not, and their relative probability with respect to each other. While finding intelligent life under almost every rock ranked #1 (as one would expect with a book of that title [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] ) finding
no intelligent life at all was ranked as more probable than intelligent life being rare. I found that interesting, as on the face of it, it went against his own hypothesis.
I don't believe that we are alone in the universe, though. Even if intelligent life is rare, on the order of a handful of intelligent species per Milky Way sized galaxy, I do not believe that it is so rare that we are the only intelligent species in the universe!
All in all, it's a very good read, and if one is going to read
Rare Earth or
Life Everywhere I would suggest picking up the other book and reading that, too.
_________________
If E = MC<sup>2</sup>, why do I have less energy the more mass my body acquires?
That is all.
--Azpod... Formerly known as James Justin
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Azpod on 2002-05-08 14:53 ]</font>