I just read
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is a great story about a multi-generational ship traveling to habitable worlds around Tau Ceti (10 light years away). The ship can travel at 0.10 c. I won't give away any plot details, but the main theme of the book is that "no starship voyage will work".
So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. So that’s my answer to the paradox. - Freya
I was critical of some of the science in the story, as were other writers (Baxter, Benford, Miller) in a review of the book:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=33838
Quote:
In a sense this is the point of the novel, that even if we reach the stars we will find only dead or hostile worlds: ‘I mean, they [alien worlds] are all going to be dead or alive, right? If they’ve got water and orbit in the habitable zone, they’ll be alive. Alive and poisonous . . . What’s funny is anyone thinking it [interstellar colonisation] would work in the first place’ (chapter 3). And as Greg noted in his essay this reflects recent misgivings expressed by Paul Davies and others about the habitability by Earth life of exoplanets.
Is this reasonable? And is Robinson correct that this could be the solution to Fermi’s famous paradox?
Joe Miller thinks that an Andromeda Strain-like organism, inimical to Earth biology, is no more or less likely than ET organisms which simply find Earth biology indigestible. We don’t know, but the possibility that ET biology would be simply oblivious to Earth biology is a plausible situation, though not treated very much in SF because it is not very dramatic!
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All from this blog about interstellar exploration:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/
In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For the last nine years, this site has coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation, and now serves as the Foundation's news forum.