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"What do we need to know about to discover life in space?" --Frank Drake, 1961In the early 1960s, Frank Drake, a young astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, developed what is now known as the "Drake Equation" in an effort to determine how many intelligent, communicative civilizations our galaxy could harbor. For forty years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has combed the skies in search of signals from star systems within the galaxy. In Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations, author Brian McConnell goes behind the scenes and examines what goes into the search for intelligent life.SETI is a four-step process. First we have to know where to look; then we must be able to send and receive signals to that star system. Once signals arrive, scientists then need to be able to interpret those signals into something that can be understood. And although we haven't yet received any signals (except for our own Earth-based transmissions), we'll eventually have to figure out a protocol for responding.Beyond Contact introduces you to:
- The history of SETI research, including the early searches of Project Ozma, traditional radio astronomy, the search for intelligence in optical wavelengths (known as Optical SETI, or OSETI), and the SETI@home project.
- An overview of the Drake Equation and the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which scientists use to estimate the number of planets in our galaxy that could harbor intelligent, communicative life forms.
- How signals are sent and received over interstellar distances. The author explains the principles of signal and image processing, and how SETI researchers identify and process analog signals using Fourier transforms to see how the power in a signal is distributed across different frequencies.
- How to build a general-purpose symbolic language for sending signals, and even computer programs, with present-day SETI equipment. The ability to transmit computer programs enables us to let another civilization know about our knowledge and technological capabilities.
The author also shows how SETI research--though often thought to be a mere flight of fancy--has spawned technological improvements in astronomy, computers, and wireless communications.Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations sidesteps the "little green men" approach to take a hard, realistic look at the technologies behind the search for intelligent life in our universe.
- Sales Rank: #200876 in Books
- Brand: Brand: O'Reilly Media
- Published on: 2001-03-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.22" w x 6.00" l, 1.69 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 350 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
As many earthlings already know--including more than 2 million computer users with firsthand experience--our best hope for finding extraterrestrial intelligence might just lie with an ingenious little screensaver. So it's not surprising that this introduction to searching for and communicating with intelligent life begins with some of the details behind UC Berkeley's groundbreaking, massively distributed SETI@home project, which processes intergalactic noise for pennies on the teraflop. But that's just the start of the story. Inventor and software developer Brian McConnell continues with an overview of whether and why we might find something out there, who's doing what to look for it (including the folks at Berkeley), and--once some ET picks up on the other end--what we might say and how we might say it.
This last problem, which occupies the final half of the book, proves to be the most thought-provoking, and McConnell has put together a methodical, nuts-and-bolts walkthrough of both the challenges involved and how binary code might be enlisted to solve them. If you've taken even a single computer-science class in your life, you'll probably skip ahead through explanations of data structures and Boolean arithmetic, but McConnell doesn't want to leave anyone behind in fleshing out his alien-friendly lingua numerica. The book's first half surveys various SETI projects, past and present, and includes generous sections on signal processing, what sort of radio and laser hardware has been mobilized for the search, and how exactly SETI@home works. (So, if nothing else, now you can know how your computer decides if it's talking to aliens while you're off having lunch.) --Paul Hughes
Review
"'Beyond Contact' summaries well what is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I recommend it for anyone as an entry level book on the subject." -- Stephane Dumas, Physicist
"A refreshingly even-handed treatment of one of the greatest puzzles of our age, the question of our apparent loneliness in the universe." -- David Brin, author of
"Remarkably fresh ideas on how to achieve contact. Wide-ranging engrossing, enjoyable. This book is definitely a winner!" -- Dr. Allen Tough, coordinator of the Web-based
"This thought provoking book ventures boldly where I fear to tread." -- Kent Cullers, Signal Detection Team Leader, Director for SETI Research and Development, SETI Institute
About the Author
Brian McConnell is the author of Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations, and a contributor to Between Worlds, an upcoming SETI book from the SETI Institute and MIT Press. McConnell also publishes TelephonyDesign.Com, an online resource about telecommunications products and technology.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A highly technical book on interstellar communication
By M. A Michaud
Readers who want a general introduction to questions related to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should look elsewhere. This is a highly technical book on the techniques and problems of communication across interstellar distances. People with strong backgrounds in science or engineering may find this material fascinating, but general readers soon will get lost. Overall rating (for techies): four stars.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
more technical information
By beverly talbot
This is not a good book for the average reader as it is very technical and involves math and
electrical information and other difficult studies.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A decent review of the basics, but more than a little dry
By Chris from San Francisco
I like the idea of this book, but the execution left a bit to be desired.
The first two sections ("Are We Alone?" and "Getting a Dial Tone") do a passably good job of introducing some of the basics of interstellar communication, ably introducing both the fundamentals of radio and optical technologies and the unique challenges of communicating a signal (any signal; the details of the signal to be sent are reserved for Part III) across interstellar distances.
Problems with the first two sections are:
(1) inconsistent readability: the author seems not to have found a consistent tone for the book, and wanders between wide-eyed pie-in-the-sky speculation and bone-dry technical detail;
(2) organizational flaws: the author routinely discusses a concept or entity throughout early chapters without a decent introduction or explanation, only to treat the subject in question at length (with the proper explanatory introduction) later in the text -- the discussion of the SETI@home distributed computing project is particularly guilty of this;
(3) lack of investigative reporting: almost every piece of information in these sections could have come out of a textbook or a web search, and it's clear that the author hasn't bothered to interview the movers and shakers in the SETI community and find out anything much about the "story behind the story," which might have made for some interesting reading;
(4) bad editing: there is a typo every few pages, which is a minor beef but in the age of spell-checkers hardly excusable.
Nonetheless, if you've never read a "Scientific American" article about SETI, the first two sections of the book would be educational. If you have any exposure to SETI prior to picking up the book, chances are that you won't learn very much (except possibly about optical SETI/CETI, which relies on the production and/or detection of laser light aimed at a specific star system, and which is grossly undertreated in the literature).
The third section ("Communicating with Other Worlds") treats the specifics of the author's ideas about what sort of message could be sent by us (or, by extension, might be received by us from others). The author makes an analogy between modular messages encoded in binary code and genes encoded by DNA, and sets up one potential system that might be used to send a complex message from star A to star B. This section is definitely the weakest in the book, for the following reasons.
(1) It treats at punishingly great length only one possible system of a presumably great many for communicating with alien intelligences, glossing over other approaches in favor of a detailed treatment of the author's pet approach. While I don't have a specific complaint with the approach described, I will say that as a working biologist, I found the author's biologically motivated analogies ("igenes," "binary DNA") strained and in some cases laughable. It probably makes the material "sexier" in the computer-science and SETI literature, but as a life scientist I mostly winced a lot.
(2) In part because of this, the author doesn't put his approach in any kind of context -- e.g., how else might we do it?
(3) It's way too long and inappropriately detailed: a great deal of theory of computation stuff that's not at all unique to SETI or the challenge of communicating with a non-human intelligence ends up in this section, and I don't think that benefits the reader more than just saying, "We'll send computer programs using the benefit of knowledge reaped from the maturing fields of cryptography and computer science and our impressive knowledge of the physical universe," and focusing more on reasons why any approach like this has shortcomings and might not work regardless of how clever you are.
All that having been said, this is an OK book. I wouldn't recommend that it be the only thing that you read about SETI, nor would I recommend that you read it cover-to-cover (unless you have troubles with insomnia), but if you're an avid reader of the SETI literature, it certainly can't hurt to pick this one up.
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