Ever wonder if anyone else is "out there" in the Universe?

I’m reading a wonderful new science book on my iPad (via the Kindle App), Paul Davies’ THE EERIE SILENCE. He’s a long-time SETI researcher (looking for signals of life on other planets), a Templeton prize-winner (an award for reconciling science and faith ecumenically).

The book explains the basic physics, biology, chemistry, and geology needed to even evaluate the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. The review I read mentioned that Davies is arguing for a much broader kind of search for radio transmissions than SETI has used so far, but the book is much less technical and policy oriented than it might seem from such a goal.

If you need to be reminded about why life needs water and why amino acids are not sufficient alone to create life, this book will help you ease yourself back into memoires of your younger self, when wondering about and testing hypotheses were equally fun.

A practical note: This ebook was not yet in the iBookstore, and even if it had been, there would have been little difference in the reading experience whether I had bought the Apple vs. the Amazon format. It is all text. Furthermore, the iBookstore has very little information about the books (although the sampling feature is helpful.) You can get a lot of detail from the Amazon pages for the printed book. Making a decision about a book you’ve only read one review of is much easier on Amazon.

It’s not likely that iTunes will start adding a lot of retail promotional copy to their offerings, but I do hope books get a little more attention as books, since they are bought and sold very differently, I think than music or TV shows. Being able to zero in on Pulitzer or Booker Prize winners, NY Times and USA Today bestsellers, for example, would be nice, but that will have to wait until more of them are released as ebooks. Of course by showing publishers that people are looking for books they can’t find in the iBookstore, Apple would have leverage to get more companies to want to stock their books everywhere.