Aliens are everywhere these days. At least, that’s how it can seem. Of course, if you scratch the surfaces of the fabled Navy UFO videos, the laughable Mexican mummies, and the guy-who-knew-a-guy-who-saw-something testifying before Congress, you find there’s not a whole lot of “there” there. Okay, but what about ʻOumuamua, the interstellar object that shot through our solar system in 2017? That’s pretty cool, right?
Hell yeah it is! But only one person of any real repute thinks it’s anything other than natural, and that’s where Laura Krantz starts with her new children’s book, Is There Anybody Out There?: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life, from Amoebas to Aliens, which is beautifully illustrated with a vibrant yet understated color palette applied to rocky planets and fantastic flying saucers.
Although it may not seem like it at first, that’s a fine place to begin, as ʻOumuamua is a good example of the discrepancy between solid science and … something else, and how smart people can end up on either side of the divide. The guy who thinks the weird, elongated object might have been sent by aliens, “a mothership that travels fast and releases baby spacecraft that freely fall into planetary systems on a reconnaissance mission,” is Avi Loeb, Harvard physicist and founder, in 2021, of the The Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts.
Loeb sort of personifies the overly common conflation of two very different topics — whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, and whether any of that life if visiting us here on Earth — and Krantz quotes him early on in Is There Anybody Out There? She then jumps right into the supposed flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, which might lead an adult reader with a historical knowledge of American UFO “research” to think this book will be a two-fisted takedown of one of the great modern myths.
In truth, most of Is There Anybody Out There? pivots to the first of the unfairly equated questions, the one in the book’s title, and it’s initially a little hard to see why. Krantz asks another, prerequisite question in chapter 3, the deceptively difficult “What is life?” She points out that whatever it is, we had 3 billion years of the unicellular version here on Earth before anything more complex started to happen, and slides in a nice explanation of evolution, which includes simple reasoning as to why “lower” forms of life still hang on, after other things have evolved from them.
Chapter 4 of Is There Anybody Out There? is perhaps the boldest, as it smashes the unwritten rule in popular writing that the more equations you include, the more people put your book down. Of course, “Doing Some Math” is really just about one equation, the one cobbled together by Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence pioneer Frank Drake in 1961, which is meant to provide the roughest of estimates for how many alien civilizations with the capability of interstellar communication there may be in our galaxy.
When it was first conceived, the Drake Equation‘s parameters were all mostly unknown, and really just functioned as placeholders. Now, 60 years later, we have better ideas for how many stars have planetary systems, and we’re starting to employ techniques to determine how many of them might be suitable for life. Much of the latter half of the equation, with things like how many planets actually do support life, and how many of those civilizations become technologically advanced, are still impossible to guess at. Is There Anybody Out There? does a good job here of emphasizing the vastness of space, and not just hand-waving its hugeness into saying there “must” be a ton of communicative aliens somewhere.
The next couple chapters of Is There Anybody Out There? go into our efforts to refine our answer to the “how many planets” question, including the transit method and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. Of course some people, like the late Stephen Hawking, think that all this trying to talk to aliens stuff is misguided. What if they come and pillage us after they find us? Thankfully, Krantz shoots down that silly concern by reminding us that if a civilization is so advanced that they’ve mastered interstellar travel, they’ve certainly found much more efficient ways to get resources. And maybe it won’t matter, because maybe intelligent aliens don’t “talk” in the same ways we do, or use technology at all.
By the time you get to this point, without really realizing it, Is There Anybody Out There? has done a pretty good job convincing you that it’s extraordinarily unlikely that if alien life does exist elsewhere in the galaxy, any of it has managed to find its way here. When Krantz describes her further experiences with UFO enthusiasts in Nevada, their reasons for maintaining belief seem almost quaint. The final chapter recounts a later interstellar object that looked much like the fabled ʻOumuamua and behaved very conventionally, a nice nod that while the universe may be strange, it’s usually also repetitive and explicable.
If you’ve heard Krantz’s name before, it’s probably in relation to her Wild Thing podcast, the first season of which consisted mainly of conversations with Bigfoot believers, before shifting to UFO folks in season 2. She’s a journalist by profession, which explains the “here’s all the info; you put it together yourself” narrative style of Is There Anybody Out There? It’s highly effective — for a reader who gets all the way through. The book is 178 pages, and while I couldn’t find any suggestions on the publisher’s website, Amazon lists an age range of 8-12, the lower end of which I imagine may have trouble maintaining continued interest.
For that reason, Is There Anybody Out There? could probably use shorter paragraphs, too, and while the many asides are informative, they also kind of distract from the overall point. And even though the book leads you to a mostly skeptical conclusion, it’s a little odd that while Loeb and UFO maven Kevin Randle are quoted, there aren’t any direct words from the other side.
Nevertheless, Is There Anybody Out There?: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life, from Amoebas to Aliens is a good lesson in thinking through a problem for teenage readers, and probably just a good resource on space exploration for children who are less advanced. It’s hard to pin down whether this is a UFO book or a science book, and maybe that’s a good thing. Usually when the two get mixed, it’s the UFO subject that gets lent undue credibility. Krantz has managed to look at the topic critically, through a scientific lens, while also not sucking all the wonder out of the universe. That’s almost as neat a trick as interstellar travel.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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