Overall, a solid book on what life elsewhere in our galaxy might look like, or might communicate like, or other things.

 

Solid, yes, and generally with a good written style, but not spectacular.The book hadn’t totally lived up to my expectations from when I grokked at my library before checking it out. Following Ed Yong’s magisterial book only made it worse.

 

I was somewhat offput by one analogy error halfway through, as well. On page 151 Kershenbaum claims a 2-dimensional Flatland world analogue to a sphere IS a sphere. No it’s not. The whole presentation was so abrupt it confused me at first.

 

Second, this universe, not just this galaxy, is predicated on three special dimensions. Ergo, as far as I and any exobiologist knows, there aren’t Flatland creatures in our actual universe. Ergo part two, Kershenbaum’s whole example is tout court.

 

I halfway get why he introduced it; it was to challenge the idea that mathematics is an ultimate, galaxy-wide, or even universe-wide, lingua franca. But, by essentially blowing the analogy, Kershenbaum undercut the argument — which might, or might not, be true.

 

I was leaning about 4-4.25 stars at the point of page 151. That dropped it to a 3.75, maybe a 3.5 if I am a bit harsh. It eventually rebounded (including better math and math analogies later) to a flat 4.

 

The other downer? Comes from the dust jacket. Kershenbaum is a member of METI, a think tank for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. It’s an obvious takeoff on SETI. SETI, in turn is based on the famous, or infamous, Drake equations. 

 

BUT! Kershenbaum never looks at the Drake equations, let alone the guesstimated parameters that SETI folks and others plug into them.

 

We fall back to 3.5 stars.