Cooper, K: Contact Paradox

What will happen if (perhaps when) humanity makes contact with another civilisation on a different planet?

In this book, space journalist Keith Cooper tackles some of the myths and assumptions that underlie SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. Some of these include

How easy will it be to detect a signal from another world?
How many Earth-like planets are out there?
Is it inevitable that life on other worlds has evolved intelligence and developed technology?
Will an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation behave altruistically towards us, and will their sense of altruism be the same as ours?
Have anthropologists fully explored what the consequences of contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation would be?

And most controversially, the trillion-dollar question:

Should we be beaming messages into space for extraterrestrial life to detect, and are there any dangers in doing so?

Across eight wide-ranging chapters, The Contact Paradox examines these topics and many others, portraying the thoughts and opinions of many SETI researchers, astronomers, historians, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and philosophers.

This book is not a potted history of SETI, but very much an expansion into the ?what if'? It takes a rigorous approach to the scientific literature, with the author learning what the real stories behind the science are, with one eye on the great METI, or Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, debate. This is the controversial plan to beam messages into space for extraterrestrial life to detect and respond to. Is conducting such activity safe, or do we risk provoking an alien species that we know nothing about? And who exactly speaks for Earth?