Reinventing Seti: New Directions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

For millennia, humanity has looked up at the sprawling tapestry of stars and wondered what lay beyond. With time, we learned that each star is not a pinprick point in a domed sky, but a massive plasma sphere so far away that the distance becomes incomprehensible to the human mind, measured in light years of millions and billions. This distance invokes crucial questions. Do we share the universe with other intelligent lifeforms? If so, how do we approach the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)? Lastly, do we need to examine our assumptions about extraterrestrial intelligence?

Reinventing SETI clears out the cobwebs of outdated or wrongheaded SETI paradigms such as Fermi’s Paradox, the Drake Equation, and METI (i.e., proactively sending signals from Earth to putative aliens). It argues that scientists should approach the pursuit of extraterrestrials (ETs) in a more effective manner. Author John Gertz states that ETs, as biological lifeforms themselves, cannot accomplish interstellar travel, but have instead placed robotic probes throughout the universe, perhaps even in our own Solar System. Gertz also warns that humankind is woefully unprepared for the day of First Contact with an alien probe right here in our own backyard. He suggests contingency planning, involving international cooperation as well as broad cross-disciplinary expertise.

Humorous and deeply informative, this book takes the reader through the universe, conventional SETI methods, ideas on future ET exploration, and a discussion on who else shares this space.

John Gertz a leader in the field of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, having served three terms as chairman of the board of the SETI institute and he currently serves as the only layman on the Breakthrough Listen Advisory Board. He has published a number of peer reviewed theoretic papers on the subject of SETI.