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Book Review published in the July, 2001, issue of LCCS Newsletter, Random Bits

Beyond Contact  A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations

by Brian McConnell

Evaluated by Nancy Rowe, LCCS Member

Remember the monolith at the beginning of the movie 2001? Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke used the discovery of this mysterious structure on the moon to kick off his story about what might happen if we got unmistakable evidence that someone else is out there. In the film Contact, from a story written by astronomer Carl Sagan, Jody Foster’s character learns that we are not alone by deliberately searching for communication signals. And who can forget the charming little alien of E.T., who accidentally let us know that we are not alone? Science fiction sagas, sure, but their popularity is evidence of our interest in the possibility that others are out there. My own favorite space flick is an old one in black and white, The Day the Earth Stood Still. In that one, they landed here deliberately to warn us to get our act together — or else! And before any of these, there was Orson Wells and his all too realistic radio broadcast announcing a Martian invasion.

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Today, more than at any other time in history, we have reason to believe that the odds favor intelligent life elsewhere. Beyond Contact addresses this issue. Statistics, and our increasing knowledge of distant star systems, tilt the scales in favor of others being out there. This being the case, SETI is serious science, and it involves more than just intercepting E.T.’s call home.

If you are one of the more than two million PC users worldwide who participate in the SETI@home project, Beyond Contact is a "must read". And if you have decided to leave your computer out of this effort, this book may change your mind. SETI@home was begun just over two years ago by astronomers at the University of California in Berkeley. If you are a participant, you are involved in the world’s most successful distributive computing project. Distributive computing links many small computers to a large mainframe computer, creating, in effect, an inexpensive supercomputer. When the SETI data from the large Arecibo radiotelescope in Puerto Rico overwhelmed Berkeley’s computer, researchers came up with an innovative solution. They developed a software program that links home computers to their mainframe. The Berkeley computer sends small batches of data to home PCs, which crunch the numbers and send the results back for further analysis. Ordinarily, much of a PCs computing power, like brainpower, is unused, and SETI@home takes advantage of this.

Home computer users can watch the process by calling up the SETI@home screensaver. This is an attractive display, with graphs and brightly colored three-dimensional plots of the data scrolling across the monitor, but interpreting all of this can be a bit daunting to the uninitiated. The author of Beyond Contact has a knack for explaining complex matters in simple terms. If you use SETI@home, the chapter that covers it will make the significance of Doppler shifts and Gaussians clear, and you will understand exactly what would earmark an authentic E.T. signal.

The book covers a lot of ground in addition to SETI@home. OSETI, or optical SETI, is described in detail. Distant civilizations might use lasers in their attempts to communicate across space. Astronomers using conventional optical telescopes to analyze the spectral fingerprints of the stars might pick up such signals during the course of their regular work, and they would recognize them.

Detecting a signal is one thing. Interpreting it is something else. And so is devising a language that the inhabitants of distant worlds might understand. Mathematics and logic are keys to establishing an interstellar language. If you are a dyed-in-the-wool SETI enthusiast, you will probably breeze through the chapters at the end of the book, which cover the nuts and bolts of how our messages to distant civilizations might be structured. Binary coding resembling the dots and dashes of Morse code could be used to send messages and pictures. You will learn what nature’s system of DNA coding has contributed to the effort, and what iGenes and memes are. If you got your start with computers in the good old days before Windows came upon the scene, you may already be familiar with some of this. Whatever the case, Mr. McConnell makes it easy to understand. But if you are not interested in exactly how we might send a message to E.T., you can omit part III entirely and still get a lot out of this book. Don’t skip the appendices, though, because there is interesting information there, including a list of Internet resources.

Mankind has always been curious about who might be out there among the stars. Ancient people built monuments to attract the attention of the gods that they believed inhabited the heavens. Modern SETI researchers, interestingly enough, don’t discount the possibility that such artifacts, like Clarke’s monolith, could still have a place in the interstellar communications tool kit. Recently, the image of the "face" on Mars raised this possibility among some observers, but higher resolution photos have dashed the hopes of all but the most fervent believers. The "face" is only a mesa with weathered features that produce interesting visual effects as the light and shadows shift. E.T. apparently did not leave his footprints on Mars. Meanwhile, the search continues.

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