"our future is in ruins"

Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 30, pp. 466-9, 1976.

After it was published this paper seems to have fallen into utter obscurity. It was pure serendipity that led me to stumble across it.

All that I can determine about John Armitage is that he became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society on 10 December 1976[1], and that the paper was also presented at the Second British Interplanetary Society Conference on Interstellar Travel and Communication, 4-5 April 1977.

In it the author argues, as I have, that it seems likely that the number of galactic extinct civilizations is greater than the number of galactic extant civilizations. Armitage makes the distinction that detectable civilizations are only apparently extant, given the relativistic gap between signal transmission and detection.
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Are We Alone In The Universe / Renewing Our Search For Alien Intelligence
Illustrated. 242 pages. Allen Lane. $15.82 – $17.82 [Buy from Amazon.com].

There are two subtitles for different editions of this fine book by Paul Davies.  Subtle promotional reasons most likely dictated the variance for different markets, but ‘Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence’ is truer to the theme of the book. Published for the 50th anniversary of SETI, Davies, one of the best cosmological science writers of our day, uses this work to challenge the assumptions of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

‘How could something as bold and visionary as SETI become conservative?’ Davies asks in the first chapter. His answer: anthropocentrism (and later, what you might call ‘radiocentrism’). There’s a great sequence in the first chapter of examples of scientists basing their work on assumptions that stem from their own preoccupations, although I suppose that potential xenoarchaeologists aren’t immune to this.
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