A review of If the Universe is Teaming With Aliens…Where Is Everybody? Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb. Second edition, 2015 Springer. . The Fermi Paradox: Where Is Everybody? This book documents and comments on 75 potential solutions or answers to the Fermi Paradox on why we haven’t found proof of intelligent, extraterrestrial life yet. The Fermi Paradox is based on the following generally accepted views on the likelihood of ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the Milky Way galaxy: The Milky Way contains about two hundred billion stars. These presumably have planets…
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Everything that exists that we know of is contingent. Something being contingent means it exists because of something else existing that caused it to exist, or at least provided the necessary conditions, for it’s existence. Contingent beings thus depend in their very existence on other things that exist. They could have thus failed to exist to begin with if not for the existence of other things. Trees, rocks, planets, galaxies, and everything else in the universe apparently, all exist contingent upon other things. The entire collection of everything we know of is an interconnected, interdependent web of contingently existing things…
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A Review of A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss; The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe, by John Barrow; The Grand Design, by Leonard Mlodinow and Stephen Hawking I just finished reading The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. I thought I would give a brief review of this and the other two books listed above. All deal with the subject of “nothing,” the universe perhaps coming from “nothing,” and the physicists here who claim this has relevance to, or even…
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The book, Infinity, Causation, & Paradox by Alexander Pruss, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. I just finished reading it as my first book by this author. I knew of him via other philosophers’ dealing with his work and through reading his blog. My first impressions of him from reading his blog was that he was a natural born philosopher, an original thinker, creative, and a top level contemporary philosopher. Or as the philosopher William Lane Craig described him, “scary smart.” Background on the author: Pruss is a theist philosopher and currently Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University…
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