Civilisations Beyond Earth: Extraterrestrial Life and Society Editors: Douglas A Vakoch and Albert A Harrison Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 978-0-85745-211-5 (print) 978-0-85745-212-2 (e-book) Price: £42 (Hb), 250pp
Check prices on Amazon amazon.co.uk                 amazon.com

This one is a little bit different to the usual tomes on SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – that fill the bookshelves. For years sections of the SETI community have bemoaned the fact that the social sciences are often sidelined in favour of the hard sciences when it comes to SETI discussion. Civilisations Beyond Earth starts to redress the balance, edited skillfully by Douglas Vakoch, the only sociologist on staff at the SETI Institute in California, and Albert Harrison, a psychologist from the University of California, Davis. Indeed, Harrison’s chapter contained one of my favourite parts, retelling the story of how Carl Sagan managed to convince US Senator William Proxmire, who in 1978 awarded SETI his notorious ‘Golden Fleece Award’ for projects that in his eyes wasted taxpayers money, that SETI wasn’t a waste of time after all.

If you’re worried this book may be full of psychobabble, don’t be. For one thing, there are healthy contributions from astronomers such as Seth Shostak and Alan Penny, as well as anthropological and archeological looks at the lifetime of civilisations and the development of biological intelligence. The middle section of the book, entitled ‘Reactions to Discovering Life Beyond Earth’ does sag a little, with chapters describing endless results from questionnaires asking what the public thinks about extraterrestrial contact lacking any solid analysis or conclusions, suggesting that the field still needs significant development in this area. Things pick up again towards the end though when the discussion moves towards actual communication, with some fascinating (and perhaps fantastical) contributions including the idea of beaming digital avatars of ourselves to meet the aliens. On the downside, the notion of sending stories told in animations of glorified stick men, as described by Harry Letaw, sounds unconvincing.

For those who are familiar with SETI and who wish to take their reading on the subject in a new direction, Civilisations Beyond Earth is an brave attempt at doing something different, but with mixed results.

Keith Cooper