Where is Everybody? (Stephen Webb) – Copernicus Books 2002).

“Where is Everybody?” is a fascinating book that attempts to answer the age-old question that simply asks – is there any intelligent life in the universe outside of Earth?  (For the purpose of this review we will assume that there is “intelligent” life on Earth, unless you count all the people that bought the last Nickelback album).  This book uses a very scientific and calculated approach to this question, which is restated as the “Fermi Paradox”.  The noted physicist made the simple observation, that if the universe is supposedly filled with stars and planets similar to ours – then where the hell are all of these aliens? 

The book is divided into three main sections: “The aliens are here”, “The aliens are out there, but we don’t see them” and “we are alone”.  Each section describes a number of solutions to the Fermi Paradox ranging from the ridiculous (an alien spaceship managed to survive interstellar travel, but crashed in New Mexico) to the inconceivable (the entire solar system is a virtual reality projection developed by aliens to fool us).  There is discussion on sound scientific ideas on why we haven’t detected any alien transmissions so far and why the extreme distances between stars make potential travel so difficult.  In all of the cases the author debunks each potential solution and leaves us pondering the same question – why can’t we find anybody else out there?  Beaming 40 years of TV commercials into space should have provoked some type of reaction by now.

The last section of the book takes the view that is seemingly becoming more accepted – there is nobody else out there!  The theories in this section all seem to point to some characteristic of the Earth and argue that this is unique and was instrumental in allowing life to flourish here (the moon, Jupiter, tectonic plate movement, etc).  The next batch of theories explain that it may be easy to develop simple organisms such as bacteria, but that a unique set of circumstances made intelligent life flourish here.  These include the fortuitous meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs; the ability of humans to use tools, develop languages and build weapons of mass destruction that  can’t be found.  Finally, the author gets to his own conclusion: we’re all by ourselves.  His reasoning follows the process of elimination.  We start off with millions and millions of potential Earths and start eliminating them due to various reasons.  The few potential planets that are most similar to Earth are dropped because the evolution of intelligent beings requires a special set of circumstances that cannot be duplicated.  There is a gigantic Milky Way galaxy out there and we’re the only ones that can even appreciate it.

I finished the book and just thought: That’s all that 288 pages of reading (between 3 visits to the Tastefest) were going to leave me with?  I felt like I just saw one of these episodes where the last 2 hours were explained as a dream.  OK – this is not good enough – I need a better reason to pay $27.50 for a hardcover book.

Since this is a science book – it’s time to play a little more science using an idea called “Proof By Contradiction”. Let us assume that the last theory is correct – we are the only intelligent life in the entire galaxy.  Let’s also assume that just one of the things that made life work here is changed.  For instance, in 1962 Khrushchev doesn’t back down when Kennedy declares an embargo of Cuba; nuclear war breaks out and the earth is turned into a barren wasteland. Little Nestor gets incinerated in Chicago and never gets to see the Ramones.  There is no life on Earth and therefore the entire galaxy is completely dead.  What’s the point now of a completely empty galaxy existing for billions of years?  Life is very devious and clever – it somehow popped up on Earth and should certainly pop up somewhere else.  It just seems so useless that there is all of this matter in existence and nobody there to do anything with it.  I’m not a very religious person (except in overtime of Stanley Cup playoff games with the Red Wings), but I just can’t accept that there is nothing and nobody anywhere else but here.  That’s just taking logic too far.