The Anxious Search: Are We Alone? By Tom Bethell

Second Story Books in Bethesda has a good selection of out-of-print science books and I drop by from time to time. I was surprised to find recently that they had a whole shelf of books about the search for extraterrestrial life. Here are just some of the titles, all published in the 1990s:

We Are Not Alone (1993), Are We Alone? (1995) Are We Alone in the Cosmos? (1999), Is Anyone Out There? (1992), Extraterrestrials: Where Are They? (1995), A Brief History of Life on Other Worlds (1998), The Hunt for Life on Mars (1997), After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life (1997), Beyond Star Trek (1997). I could add half a dozen more, and others have appeared since, including Rare Earth (2000), Where Is Everybody? (2002), and on and on. Since 1981, four books have been published with the title Are We Alone?

So what's this all about? The novelist Michael Crichton commented on one aspect of this comedy in an entertaining and instructive lecture at Caltech in 2003 -- "Aliens Cause Global Warming." There is "not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms and in 40 years none has been discovered. SETI is a religion," he said. Then he gave us a brief tour of nuclear winter, second-hand smoke, and finally global warming, wherein science always defers to politics. We are seeing a "loosening of the definition of what constitutes legitimate scientific procedure," he concluded.

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