FERMI'S PARADOX

Yeomans presents a detailed breakdown of the science behind life on Earth—and possibly elsewhere—in this nonfiction work.

The “paradox” referred to in the title was articulated in a 1950 conversation in which physicist Enrico Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?”—meaning, given the fact that the universe is an estimate 14 billion years old and contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, where are all the aliens? On the basis of the numbers involved, surely intelligent life must abound in the universe, yet humanity has detected not the slightest hint of any such life beyond our own world. “Our gut feeling,” Yeomans writes, “is that there ought to be plenty of intelligent extraterrestrials out there.” Before attempting to address this conundrum, the author spends a generous amount of time laying out some scientific basics, including Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, and the characteristics of life and its development on Earth at the cellular and societal levels. He moves on to discuss the Drake equation, which attempts to assign some concrete percentages to variables like the number of hospitable stars, the number of inhabitable planets, the fraction of those planets that might develop life, and so on. Yeomans details the demands and advantages of various environments, the evolution of upright primates, and the eventual rise of Homo sapiens, supplementing the text with charts, illustrations, and bullet points to help readers digest the enormous amount of information he presents. Yeomans is a first-rate explainer, keeping his prose smoothly readable while infusing every part of his book with an infectious enthusiasm, but the work disappoints in its almost complete avoidance of its putative central question. As an engaging breakdown of basic biological science, the book is superb; as an examination of the Fermi paradox, it’s a clean miss, as the actual paradox is scarcely addressed, much less argued. Happily, the author’s ability to make detailed bio-science approachable and fascinating wins the day; the book just needs a different title.

A fact-filled and very inviting exploration of biology.