Real-World Probability Books: the Fermi Paradox
Cirkovic, Milan M.
The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi's Paradox.
Oxford University Press, 2018.
See my amazon.com review.
Webb, Stephen.
If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?:
Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life.
Springer, 2015.
The Fermi paradox is:
The Universe is very big and very old; given there is a human technological civilization on Earth, why don't we see
evidence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations?
Devising possible explanations is an interesting exercise, as organized logic.
A top-down organization might start with the alternatives
- they (almost) never arise.
- they don't last long in a form we would recognize, so none are currently close enough to detect.
- they do currently exist but we can't detect them for some reason.
This book expands these into 50 more detailed possible explanations.
Of course everyone has their own favorite alternative explanation, and some can be found in
the amazon.com reviews.
Davies, Paul.
The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence.
Mariner Books, 2011.
This amazon.com review
matches my own favorable opinion.
Ward, Peter Douglas and Brownlee, Donald.
Rare Earth: why complex life is uncommon in the universe.
Copernicus 2000.
Advocates the hypothesis that,
while microscopic life might be widespread in the universe,
the evolution and long term survival of complex organisms must be rare, because on earth the latter
involved some highly fortuitous set of circumstances.
Well written and thought-provoking, though not especially convincing: see Ehrlich's
Eight Preposterous Propositions for a critique.
Aczel, Amir D.
Probability 1.
Harvest Books, 2000.
See my amazon.com review.
Back to complete book list.