“If we dare to wager that Oumuamua was a piece of advanced extraterrestrial technology, we stand only to gain,” he writes in this book arguing his case, which doubles as a poignant memoir of his childhood on an Israeli farm and his passion for space science.
Kerschenbaum comes to some surprising conclusions: Some version of Darwinian selection would be at work in any life form — and alien evolution will probably follow the path of our own, limiting the menu of possibilities.
This collection, edited by Al-Khalili, a quantum physicist, gathers experts who have looked up at the night sky and pondered the question: Where is everybody? The consensus is that aliens will look and act nothing like the way we imagine them in the movies.
No two words in the American lexicon more quickly summon images of little green men and hovering white disks than “Area 51,” the mysterious test range in southern Nevada.
He was happy to have something he called “faith” in the existence of other worlds — he famously created the “golden record,” meant for any extraterrestrials who might encounter the Voyager space probe.
Ward and Brownlee, two prominent scientists, argue in this 2000 book that it’s highly unlikely that the conditions that led to life on Earth can exist elsewhere.