A review by abarrera
Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb
4.0
Gripping read! Not only is Loeb a phenomenal scientist, he's also an extraordinary divulgator and writer. I really enjoyed the first half of the book. The way he analyzes the evidence around the 'Oumuamua interstellar object is amazing. His hypothesis of extraterrestrial tech is definitely plausible and I agree with him that the scientific community tends to be biased around SETI-related conclusions.
The book though felt a little long. It reaches a point where it's all about Loeb's essays on the state of the scientific community and how we should be thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence. There is virtue in all of it, but it extends the book too much.
If anything, it feels there is a pronounced personal bias around how a potential alien civilization might behave. His theories oscillate from being like "humans" and using "humanity" as the experimental baseline, to affirming they would probably be more advanced than humans. While I felt he has a brilliant command of the scientific dimensions, he kind of slipped on the anthropological ones imho. It might be the way he writes about it or the book's editing, but it felt his arguments were way more tenuous when he talked about the human-alien dimensions than the actual physics.
Overall, a very good book to open your mind to other potential realities. One that is surprisingly solid on the evidence side, at least when related to the object itself.
The book though felt a little long. It reaches a point where it's all about Loeb's essays on the state of the scientific community and how we should be thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence. There is virtue in all of it, but it extends the book too much.
If anything, it feels there is a pronounced personal bias around how a potential alien civilization might behave. His theories oscillate from being like "humans" and using "humanity" as the experimental baseline, to affirming they would probably be more advanced than humans. While I felt he has a brilliant command of the scientific dimensions, he kind of slipped on the anthropological ones imho. It might be the way he writes about it or the book's editing, but it felt his arguments were way more tenuous when he talked about the human-alien dimensions than the actual physics.
Overall, a very good book to open your mind to other potential realities. One that is surprisingly solid on the evidence side, at least when related to the object itself.