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Loading... Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligenceby Sarah Scoles
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  billsearth | Jul 30, 2017 |  no reviews | add a review
"Jill Tarter is a pioneer, an innovator, an adventurer, and a controversial force. At a time when women weren't encouraged to do much outside the home, Tarter ventured as far out as she could -- into the three-Kelvin cold of deep space. And she hasn't stopped investigating a subject that takes and takes without giving much back. Today, her computer's screensaver is just the text "SO ... ARE WE ALONE?" This question keeps her up at night. In some ways, this is the question that keep us all up at night. We have all spent dark hours wondering about our place in it all, pondering our "aloneness," both terrestrial and cosmic. Tarter's life and her work are not just a quest to understand life in the universe: they are a quest to understand our lives within the universe. No one has told that story, her story, until now. It all began with gazing into the night sky. All those stars were just distant suns-were any of them someone else's sun? Diving into the science, philosophy, and politics of SETI - searching for extraterrestrial intelligence - Sarah Scoles reveals the fascinating figure at the center of the final frontier of scientific investigation. This is the perfect book for anyone who has ever looked up at the night sky and wondered if we are alone in the universe."-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)576.8Natural sciences and mathematics Life Sciences, Biology Genetics and evolution EvolutionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.13)
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Wikipedia in English
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The book on Jill Tarter is a very good biography, including the in-laws, daughter's growing up and her two husbands and her lifestyle.
Most of the biography is centered on her desire to search for intelligent life through radio wave listening, using her advanced degrees in radio astronomy and her degree in engineering. The author writes very well, focusing on Tarter, not the physics of the radio waves or the design of the detectors or principles of the different type radio scopes used. This gives the reader a good impression of Tarter's efforts toward her goal of finding life outside earth.
I recommend reading this book to anyone interested in the topic of possible intelligent life outside earth. After reading, the reader must then look up the Drake equation and find somehow the current bracketed values for its constants to come up with the possibility of other intelligent life. This is the only thing I noticed that could have been added near the end of the book. That equation is in numerous texts, just not this one since this is a story of Tarter, not the search results s far, or progress on the Drake equation. Tarter was very helpful, even essential in narrowing the brackets for the equation but the author focused on Tarter, not the progress in defining the chances of other life.
I also recommend this book for all women thinking about going into science or engineering. Tarter is a good role model and she gave opinions in this book on how women can succeed in science, in fact more than just succeed. (