If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life
In a 1950 conversation at Los Alamos, four world-class scientists generally agreed, given the size of the Universe, that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations must be present. But one of the four, Enrico Fermi, asked, "If these civilizations do exist, where is everybody?" Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 million stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 million galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14 billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. Webb discusses in detail the 50 most cogent and intriguing solutions to Fermi's famous paradox.
Technology and Science in Ancient Civilizations by Richard G. Olson - is historical book about cross-cultural comparison of the ways in which the ancients learned about and preserved their knowledge of the natural world, and the ways in which they developed technologies that enabled them to adapt to and shape their surroundings.
Prehistory and Early Civilizations, this fascinating resource presents pro and con arguments for a series of unresolved controversies concerning significant historical development.
This book features 14 expert contributors, each an established historian supporting either the 'pro' or 'con' point of view of a historic controversy with credible evidence and well-reasoned arguments. It contains 20 sidebars with excerpts from relevant primary source materials. It includes 13 chapters on significant historical questions. The pro and con debate format encourages readers to evaluate the validity of arguments and evidence.
The Middle Sea, In his latest sweeping history, the author of "Byzantium" considers the "political fortunes" of the lands of the Mediterranean from the age of ancient Greece to the First World War. Taking as a starting point the region’s unique geography, which seems to have been "deliberately designed" as a "cradle of cultures," he focusses on the rise and fall of civilizations through battles and their heroes, paying particular attention to the Christian and Muslim struggle for dominance. At times, the geographical framework feels arbitrary.
Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?
