Skip to main content

The Aliens are Coming! - Ben Miller *****

This book is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The packaging – from the exclamation mark in the title to the frequent use of words like “witty” and “entertaining” in the various celebrity endorsements, and the emphasis on the author’s track record as a comedian and TV personality – all lead you to envisage a flippant, unchallenging read. I opened the book expecting a light-hearted debunking of ufology (always good for a few laughs), followed by a journalistically glib recycling of the “real science” of SETI, exoplanets, extremophiles et al. But what I got went much, much deeper than that.

There’s a lot of science in this book – and not just the obvious topics. What other popular book on astrobiology embraces subjects like information entropy, or the anthropic principle, or gamma-ray bursts, or Zipf’s law? Miller’s explanations of the first two are as engaging and lucid as I’ve seen anywhere, and as for the last two – well, I never would have guessed they were relevant to SETI until he pointed it out.

A longstanding hobbyhorse of mine is that the aliens of popular imagination – as evidenced in sci-fi movies and UFO reports – look much too similar to homo sapiens to have any scientific credibility. Real aliens are going to be much more alien than that. It’s a point Miller makes in the very first pages of the book – and before long he’s gone even further. Professional scientists make analogous if less obvious mistakes. Most SETI initiatives are based on the unstated assumption that aliens are going to think and communicate in much the same way that Earth scientists do in the early 21st century. Astrobiologists tend to think of “life” as synonymous with multicellular DNA-based organisms, with so-called extremophiles being as weird as it gets (Miller, incidentally, thinks the extremophiles came first, so actually we’re the extreme ones). Even here on Earth, however, there may be non-DNA life in the form of desert varnish – the jury has been out on that one since Darwin’s time.

Despite the expectations set by that titular exclamation mark, anyone looking for dumbed-down science isn’t going to find it in this book. Quite the opposite, in fact. Although Miller has a lively, easy-to-read style, he clearly thinks like a scientist – and occasionally he does scientist-like things that a more seasoned pop-science writer would never do. He uses equations, for example – not just once or twice, but quite a lot. He assumes readers know what logarithms are, and how to convert between logs to different bases. Sometimes he forgets who he’s talking to, and uses words in a way that only physics graduates use them (Example: “The chance of a third helium nucleus colliding with beryllium-8 in time to make carbon-12 is therefore vanishingly slim. Hoyle’s genius was to suggest that there might be a fortuitous resonance, in the form of an excited state of carbon, which exactly matched the energy of the beryllium-8 nucleus when capturing a helium nucleus.”)

To put it in a nutshell, The Aliens Are Coming! is highbrow content in lowbrow packaging. For me, the biggest downside of this arrangement is that the author doesn’t cite his sources. The book has an unusually large number of footnotes, but they’re almost all textual asides rather than references. Miller clearly put a lot of effort into primary-source research, and I would have welcomed a few pointers to help me dig deeper into some of the topics for myself. A second “lowbrow” feature of the book is the lack of an index – but that hardly matters, because this isn’t a book for dipping into. It’s one you’re going to read from cover to cover.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Andrew May

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...