Seth Shostak

Quotes by Seth Shostak

• If you still believe that aliens would travel hundreds of light years to carve temporary graffiti in our wheat, then your imagination is one of the seven wonders of the world, and should be bronzed.

  Read quote

• If you still believe that aliens would travel hundreds of light years to carve temporary graffiti in our wheat, then your imagination is one of the seven wonders of the world, and should be bronzed.

  Read quote

• If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an hour. It's called the asthenosphere - a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth's cool epidermis - the so-called tectonic plates.

  Read quote

• When was the last time you bought an American-made radio or television? If you're Gen X or younger, the answer is 'never.' Does the label on that shirt or skirt you're wearing say 'Made in the U.S.A.'? If so, you probably got it at Goodwill, or maybe at a Smithsonian garage sale.

  Read quote

• Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.

  Read quote

• While human space travel is daunting, machines - with their indefinitely long lifetimes - could travel the galaxy. It might make little difference to them that bridging the distance from one star to the next could take hundreds of thousands of years or more.

  Read quote

• The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize - to be awarded for sending a robotic spacecraft to this nearby world that can roam at least 500 meters, and send back data such as a photo.

  Read quote

• Judging by informal observation, most young Americans burn up their spare time buffing their emotional IQ and self-esteem with social media and non-stop texting. That's great for eye-thumb coordination, but what about the satisfaction of actually making something?

  Read quote

• We haven't yet found a speck of evidence for biology on another world, so we have no objective way to judge whether life is a onetime fluke or a near-inevitable phenomenon.

  Read quote

• We're not just any star stuff, most of which is humdrum hydrogen and listless helium. Our bodies include fancier ingredients like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and a few other herbs and spices.

  Read quote

• Virtually any pointed edifice is considered a candidate for alien engineering. After all, how could the Egyptians or Mayans have possibly stacked up stone blocks into pyramids?

  Read quote

• Clearly, enriching the cosmos with heavy elements takes a while. So there's inevitably an interval between the sterile aftermath of the Big Bang and a time when the cosmic chemistry set had enough ingredients to make rocky planets (and squishy biology).

  Read quote

• Faith is a personal matter, and should never be a cudgel to stifle inquiry. We tried that approach about 1,200 years ago. The experiment was called the Dark Ages.

  Read quote

• The central region of the Milky Way, known as the bulge, is stuffed with literally tens of billions of stars. And most of these are old - considerably older than our Sun or its neighbors - because this part of the galaxy formed first. Consequently, bulge stars are generally deficient in heavy elements.

  Read quote

• Engineers are now experimenting with 4,096-line TV systems, suggesting that with the next generation of sets you'll be able to count the grass blades on the Superbowl field, an obvious lifestyle improvement.

  Read quote

• Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated.

  Read quote

• Each year, thousands of UFOs are sighted and reported, which is an impressive tally of unidentified aerial phenomena. Surveys show that roughly one-third of the populace believes that at least some of this sky show is due to extraterrestrial spacecraft, here to probe our airspace and, when that proves boring, our bodies.

  Read quote

• On Mars, where the air is spare - a hundred times less dense than on Earth - someone could hear you scream. But you'd have to really strain to get anyone's attention. On the Red Planet, where the wind is high-pitched and faint, even a symphony orchestra will sound as thin as cheap gruel.

  Read quote

• The most attractive habitats for synthetic sentience might be the vicinities of exceptional sources of energy - for example black holes, or even the neighbourhoods of large stars, which routinely boil off the energy of ten thousand suns. These are the destinations they may seek.

  Read quote

• We can never prove that we're alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we're not.

  Read quote