The Aliens Are Coming | Ben Miller | Talks at Google

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Discover the fascinating and cutting-edge science behind the greatest question of all: is there life beyond Earth?
For millennia, we have looked up at the stars and wondered whether we are alone in the universe. In the last few years, scientists have made huge strides towards answering that question. In The Aliens are Coming!, comedian and bestselling science writer Ben Miller takes us on a fantastic voyage of discovery, from the beginnings of life on earth to the very latest search for alien intelligence.

What soon becomes clear is that the hunt for extra-terrestrials is also an exploration of what we actually mean by life. What do you need to kickstart life? How did the teeming energy of the Big Bang end up as frogs, trees and quantity surveyors? How can evolution provide clues about alien life? What might it look like? (Probably not green and sexy, sadly.)

As our probes and manned missions venture out into the solar system, and our telescopes image Earth-like planets with ever-increasing accuracy, our search for alien life has never been more exciting - or better funded. The Aliens are Coming! is a comprehensive, accessible and hugely entertaining guide to that search, and our quest to understand the very nature of life itself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ben Miller is, like you, a mutant ape living through an Ice Age on a ball of molten iron, orbiting a supermassive black hole. He is also an actor, comedian and approximately one half of Armstrong & Miller. He's presented a BBC Horizon documentary on temperature and a Radio 4 series about the history of particle physics, and wrote a regular science column in The Times. He is slowly coming to terms with the idea that he may never be an astronaut.

[slovokia]

Dear Google: Please raise the RMS level of the audio of these videos - they are hard to hear on an Ipad. Some EQ, compression and limiting might be useful.

[learpilotken]

It was better and more interesting then the title would suggest

[bimmjim]

Think about how much science we have learned in the last 120 years. Now, what do you think we will discover in the next 120 years? Now, understand that the Aliens could be 1, 000, 000, 000 years older than we are.
Also, we don't know what caused the Cambrian explosion and therefore, we don't know why it didn't happen 1, 000, 000, 000 years earlier. Right? We don't know very much at all.

[Bishbashboshboshbosh]

There are bloody loads of laymen science books out there.

[Greenhead]

UN..i guess has the monopoly on space, if you have to ask a UN Official before wanting to explore space., that seems weird.

[gerardmiller]

The aliens are already here. They are able to travel to the universe. And there technology is extreamly advanced, as they are many diverse physical beings, Male and female. The angels are the aliens. Yes this is written in Ezekiel chapter one. Ezekiel describes a round craft that flew back and forth like lightning. Not like a bat or a bird. Just remember that the devils are there allso.

[Raskolnikov]

All went way over my head.
Fair warning: You kinda need a fair bit of prior knowledge of a number of different scientific disciplines to keep up with this.