Book Excerpt for the Day

    “It’s a SETI site.”

    “SETI?”

    “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

    “Oh, right.”

    He talked quickly.  “We’ve spent forty years now listening for radio whispers from the sky.  But that’s twentieth-century thinking.  If you were an ETI, and you wanted to learn something about the Earth, what would you study?  What better than the Internet?  It’s by far the largest, most organized information source on the planet.”

    I said carefully, “You imagine aliens are logging on.”

    “Well, why not?  You’d learn a lot more about humankind than by sticking a probe up the rectum of a farmer.”    

    (from Coalescent by Stephen Baxter)

  8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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