Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Search
Seth Shostak’s Confessions of an Alien Hunter
June 23rd, 2009
No, Seth Shostak is not a Predator, although that would be a cool book…
Seth is a radio astronomer who works for the SETI Institute hunting for alien signals from space, and he has a book out called Confessions of an Alien Hunter which is about SETI and his personal experiences with the project.
You may have noticed me linking to some of Seth’s articles in the past, sometimes responding at length or just a brief mention in Starlinks.
First let me say a few positive things about the book. Notably, it’s quite well written and an engaging read. I tend to find non-fiction slow going sometimes, and sometimes get mired in something I want to finish but begin to dread. Confessions of an Alien Hunter is chatty and entertaining throughout. I liked the dramatized scenes of what happens when there is a possible detection, and the combination of over and under reaction by different groups (e.g., the scientists and the media).
After a read of the book, you’ll have a pretty fair view of the history of SETI without a lot of excessive gushing (acknowledging that Seth is an optimist). I was particularly interested in the description of events concerning how the federal government shut down NASA funding for SETI and how the effort transitioned to private sources of support.
I was also favorably impressed by how well the point was made about how poor the SETI search has been to date. I think there’s a general notion that if aliens are trying to contact us, we’ll know it immediately and easy, like in a Hollywood movie. It would be even tougher if not impossible with current technology if they’re not trying especially to talk to us. I also think there’s an excellent point to be made about how the quick pace of technological advancement has meant rapid growth in SETI power. Radio astronomy in particular benefits from computer advances more dramatically than most other types (e.g. optical).
There’s a good update on exoplanet discoveries (although that’s rapidly getting outdated as the field is moving so fast) and how one term in the Drake Equation is getting nailed down a lot better in favor of optimistic numbers.
Personally, I think SETI is a longshot to turn up something in our lifetimes, but definitely worth the effort at least at levels currently planned. I am not optimistic enough to shift own my research to SETI, but I would if we found a signal. And that’s another detail I appreciated learning. The way the searches are done, there’s not much information being collected initially and it might take years to build the equipment to properly followup the detection of a real SETI signal, if it comes in at a weak level (which wouldn’t be unlikely).
Seth also covers the claims by UFO fans and abductees in a pretty reasonable way, in my opinion. He’s fair, and very skeptical, which I think is the correct response given the available evidence.
The book is not very technical in general, and if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of SETI and how different searches have been conducted in detail, you need to look elsewhere.
Finally, here’s a promotional youtube video featuring Seth talking about SETI:
Wish I had such nice videos to promote my books. Well, Seth deserves it. Good book.
Let me know if you’re interested in an interview with Seth and feel free to suggest questions. I know him online a little bit and expect he’d be happy to do it.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Like a lot of skeptics, Seth doesn’t actually listen much to the best of the UFO researchers or pay any attention to their data; he beats dead horses and caricatures the endeavor. Some sort of visitation is the best explanation for a lot of the UFO phenomena; whether it is ET or something far far stranger is the question. Extraordinary claims may require extraordinary evidence, but the refusal to examine extraordinary claims isn’t science; it’s intellectual cowardice.
I’m reminded of the century of strong evidence for continental drift which was skillfully ignored and ridiculed by the entire geological community. Geologists would invent ‘land bridges’ to link the continents to allow the fossil species to migrate from one broken plate of pangea to the other. Manufacturing fake land bridges from nothing at all was somehow more scientific than accepting the fact of continental drift before its mechanism could be explained by plate tectonics.
Should a SETI signal be detected; should life be found on mars, I suspect the research climate would change, and a greater openness on the part of the national security apparatus would yield interesting data.
I believe that suddenly, a lot of data ignored by the Shostaks will become as interesting as the evidence for continental drift became.
Nothing will happen until then. UFOs are forbidden science; a real phenomena warped through the national security apparatus, used to camouflage experimental aircraft, balloons, satellites. Exploited by madmen and thieves. Linked to mental illness.
The phenomena seems to have the effect of inducing mental illness in those that poke at it too much; the hordes of casual witnesses don’t seem to be adversely affected, but if you look at the careers of a lot of UFO people, they start out sort of empirical and eventually bug out.
Like PKDs dilemma; it’s easiest to see UFOs as a symptom of mental illness; the problem is that this doesn’t explain it all, either. Fatima, Phoenix Lights, Ohare, the 50s washington flap, stubenville—something is there.
It is very strange. I recall reading a book by a guy named Rutlidge, who was an astronomer of some sort I think; he would set up his equipment to try to document and study stuff he was seeing and the phenomena played with him. The equipment would fail, and the lights would appear. They’d point the cameras in one direction, and the lights would appear behind him. They would move the equipment, and the lights would disappear. He gradually becomes convinced that the phenomena is interacting with his mind.
What is dissapointing is that the Shostaks aren’t interested enough in the phenomena to even debunk it properly. In the mexico FLIR event a few years back, they hauled some astronomers out to pronounce the video footage swamp gas or venus or something; it took a UFO researcher to retrace the flight of the aircraft in his piper cub, and to discover that the ‘ufos’ were heat images shining through cloud cover.
Now the crazy thing about UFO people is, after this had been debunked, obviously debunked, many in the community still clung to it.
I wish more qualified people were willing to poke through this stuff; there are diamonds mixed in with the trash. I enjoy listening to the so far silent sky, of course; but it is odd that this activity precludes examining evidence closer to home.
Well, I believe science wins out in the end, although it may take some time. I don’t necessarily agree that there are a lot of diamonds there, but haven’t dug through the trash very much, I admit. I have no doubt that people have seen strange things in the sky. I am certain experimental military craft have been spotted during testing, for instance, and other things not too common. That’s a far cry from making the case that there’s something extraterrestrial going on.
I believe anything and everything should be subject to scientific inquiry, and have had my own problems with the skeptical community being way too dorky. I agree with you that a huge problem is that gullible believers cling to way too much crap on these sorts of topics. It’s too bad that the entire public isn’t well educated about science and how it (ought to) work.
I’d be curious to dig through some of the stuff myself except that there are hoaxers and much of the evidence is poor and there’s not a very good obvious way to follow up.
Maybe some future survey systems can do the job and corroborate sightings.
I never said a lot of diamonds. There are never a lot of diamonds; hence my use of them as metaphor!
I have watched some of the ‘best’ cases dissolve under my scrutiny; I have then seen that dissolve dissolved by another viewpoint; both sides aren’t above simply manufacturing data; they hate each other psychotically.
A lot of debunking amounts to character assassination; ascribing to UFO researchers mental illness or monetary motives, or both.
This reminds me of how Rove handled Bushes cocaine history by feeding the story to the author of the book Fortunate Son. Rove knew that the Bush’s cocaine use would eventually emerge; so he found a flawed entity to carry that story to the press.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunate_Son_(Hatfield)
The phenomena could find no better way to mask itself than to present itself through so many of the flawed vessels of ufology.
The best UFO researchers do not insist that the phenomena is ET.
They want to research what appears to be tangible physical objects, which are sometimes observed by multiple trained witnesses independently, miles apart, tracked by radar; these objects sometimes accelerate at 10 gs; they sometimes disappear; reappear; fragment into multiple objects and remerge, etc etc etc.
ET in a metal space ship doesn’t explain most of this stuff either.
There may be mechanisms whereby coordinated hallucinations occur or can be generated; reality created; memories implanted; a good chunk of the species may be fantasy prone, unable to even discern the real from the unreal (this would explain a lot.) UFOlogy could be the lens that resolves some persistent questions about the human condition; if only about the formation of religion, in the worst case scenario.
I agree that some of the UFO stuff is very interesting. I don’t know how to proceed with a lot of it, however. Can you propose an experiment? Describe a way to validate observations after the fact?
I fear your worst case scenario very much, and have seen it before in almost everything outside of mainstream science, which detracts greatly from all topics that may have some intrinsic merit. Some fringe fields are totally full of shit, and some fields only mostly. UFOs, for instance, certainly include sightings by quite rational people who saw something unusual.
I also lament that our species has a lot of flaws when it comes to observation and belief. Something like 3/4 of Americans believe that angels regularly visit us, in the flesh. Where’s the evidence? Let’s analyze some feathers in the lab! Or at least enjoy the one-hit wonder from Real Life back in the 1980s…
The debunkers will always find flaws in any evidence for ET visitations, citing the lack of material evidence and subjective human perception. Probably the most reliable account is Rendlesham forest… The many pilot sitings, and one from Apollo 11. But why hasn’t an advanced civilization anounced their presence? It could be that they are bound by a form of the prime directive, although from abductee accounts observation and study has included taking the occasional sample from a human.
And surely if we discovered a planet (in future centuries) mired in conflict, with thermonuclear capability, plus the probability that they’d consider us a threat, we wouldn’t make our presence known.
I think alien detection needs to be done on a more pro-active way, such as increasing the use of photon pulse detection and transmission.
Major thanks for the article.Thanks Again. Want more.