Pedro Lilienfeld

Letter responding to Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece about extraterrestrial life.

February 8, 2021

In Search of Alien Life

In a review of current debates about whether extraterrestrials have visited Earth, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses the Fermi paradox, which asks, in reference to aliens, “Where are they?” (Books, January 25th). Some useful context is the Rare Earth hypothesis, which argues that advanced life is an extremely unlikely outcome of Darwinian evolution; after all, life required nearly four billion years—almost one-third of the age of our universe—to develop on Earth. There is growing consensus that intelligent life here may well have depended on improbable contingencies such as the Chicxulub asteroid impact, sixty-six million years ago, which obliterated the dinosaurs. Fermi’s question, seen in the light of the Rare Earth hypothesis, could yield the answer “They are not there.”

Pedro Lilienfeld
Lexington, Mass.

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Letter in response to Sam Knight’s piece about the history pf the BBC.

May 16, 2022

The Global BBC

Sam Knight, in his article about the history of the BBC, discusses the organization’s breadth and reach (“London Calling,” April 18th). He could have also mentioned another important contribution in this vein—the BBC’s services in international languages. Living in Quito, Ecuador, during the nineteen-forties and fifties, I grew up with the corporation’s Spanish-language shortwave broadcasts. The content was outstanding: news, commentary, music, and literary presentations, among which I can recall masterly serial readings of “Don Quixote.” The Spanish-language department of the BBC was then at its apogee, populated by luminaries from the expatriate community of Iberian writers and poets. Later, the service attempted to provide an objective perspective on the Falklands War between the U.K. and Argentina, in the face of governmental pressure to do otherwise. The BBC instituted similarly diverse and effective programming in a variety of languages, directed at other regions of the globe, through its World Service. I miss the Spanish-language radio transmissions to Latin America, which ceased in 2011, following budget cuts.

Pedro Lilienfeld

Lexington, MA