If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens... Where is Everybody? Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

About this book

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artefacts of these extraterrestrials?

In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book, Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to Fermi's famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Contents

- Foreword
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Preface to the Third Edition
- Where is Everybody?
- Of Fermi and Paradox
- They are (or were) Here
- They Exist, But we Have Yet to See or Hear From Them
- They Don`t Exist
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Physicist Stephen Webb is best known as the author of popular science books: he published Measuring the Universe: The Cosmological Distance Ladder in 1999, the first edition of If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life in 2002, Out of this World: Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics in 2004 and New Eyes on the Universe: Twelve Cosmic Mysteries and the Tools We Need to Solve Them in 2012.