Volume 28, Number 19 · December 3, 1981
A Close Encounter
By Gunther S. Stent
Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature
by Francis Crick
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., $12.95
Ten years ago, Carl Sagan of Cornell University invited me to go with him to a conference held at a mountain-top astronomical observatory, high above the Armenian city of Yerevan. The conference, sponsored jointly by the US and USSR Academies of Science, had 'Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence,' or CETI, as its topic. I recall it here since it is directly relevant to the new book by Francis Crick. Certainly it was the most fantastic of the many international scholarly gatherings I have attended. The agenda of the CETI Conference was twofold: to assess the chances that there are any extraterrestrial intelligent (ETI) beings with whom we might communicate (or who might be trying to communicate with us), and to decide on the most practical means by which we (or they) might effect such communication. An interdisciplinary group of about fifty scholars had been invited, mostly from the US and the USSR, to address these two questions.
Review, 3281 words
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