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Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
Maybe someday
44
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
23/100Critics
15/100Scholars
94/100Author:
Avi Loeb
Publisher:
Mariner Books
Date:
January 26, 2021
Harvard's top astronomer lays out his controversial theory that the solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star.
What The Reviewers Say
... part graceful memoir and part plea for keeping an open mind about the possibilities of what is out there in the universe — in particular, life.
I have a lot of time for Loeb. He has a joy in conjecture and an omnivorous spirit of inquiry that are more reminiscent of 20th-century thinkers such as Freeman Dyson or Carl Sagan than most of his peers. His readiness to stake his reputation on such an unconventional hypothesis is a mark of uncommon bravery...But this is a pretty thin book. It’s thin in a literal sense: the core thesis, which does not amount to more than a Scientific American cover feature, is padded out about 200 pages with excursions into memoir, the Sherlock Holmes stories and the imponderability of black holes.
[Loeb] offers strong evidence to support this conclusion, but perhaps more valuable is how he uses this as a jumping-off point for much broader musings on the state of science.
Like an astronomical Sherlock Holmes, a character often invoked in the book, Loeb concludes that 'the simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.' You don’t have to share his conviction to be impressed by the breadth of his argument.
