re: ETI
Yah, a good book but as we all know still speculative. Probably none of us buy all their "it has to be just like the Earth was/is" arguements. As a somewhat rare Earther myself, I think RL's swag of an ETI per several galaxies is probably the case, assuming that there are ANY ETI in the observable universe at all. Despite this, I advocate and have contrubuted to SETI. I think OSETI is an exciting area for data mining.