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" About the only things that are unique to Earth are our biota and our culture. If aliens ever come here, they'd most likely be either biologists or music fans. Neither one has much reason to antagonize our armed forces. "

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" Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced. "

Seth Shostak

Clouds

Today

Wrinkles

" When I was a kid, which was just after Edison invented moving pictures, there were films that involved aliens coming to Earth for bad purposes. "

" Like prospecting in the 19th century, reconnaissance of the asteroids would of necessity take place in an arena where trouble is likely and help is distant. Heroic stories of individual triumph and failure, set on landscapes never seen by humankind, are in the cards. "

" Jupiter, a world far larger than Earth, is so warm that it currently radiates more internal heat than it receives from the Sun. "

" 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. "

" The longtime standard for American TV was 525 lines from top to bottom of the image. As a practical matter, that was roughly equivalent to 350 thousand pixels - pretty crude, given that photos made with your iPhone boast five million pixels. "

" Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators. "

" 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. "

Seth Shostak

Just

Star

" The majority of my UFO diet consists of reports describing suspected encounters. This is not surprising, as there are thousands of sightings annually. The emailer has seen something unusual in the sky that he interprets as probable evidence of alien presence. "

Seth Shostak

Evidence

Diet

" The limitless content of our universe might be only one instance of a large (and possibly infinite) number of other universes. "

" 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. "

" Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine. "

" 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. "

" The Earth has been lawned with life for something over 3.5 billion years. That's a span of time great enough to encompass some honest-to-goodness catastrophe. For example, 700 million years ago, Earth underwent a planet-wide deep freeze, with ice covering the oceans from the poles to the equator. "

" It's worth noting that invoking God as the entity who set our universe in motion isn't contradicted by the data. Of course, scientists would say the supreme being hypothesis is faith, and outside the realm of science - that it's not amenable to experiment. But we currently have the same problem with the notion of parallel universes. "

" I still remember my dismay in the summer of 2007 when - for the first time in the history of planet Earth - America's share of auto production dropped below 50 percent. "

" In a movie, it's often important to have aliens whose gestures and facial expressions can be 'read' by humans. And in the days before sophisticated computer animation, most extraterrestrial bit players were guys in rubber suits. Such practical considerations forced Hollywood's hand when it came to aliens - they look like us for good reasons. "

" Many people suggest using mathematics to talk to the aliens, and Dutch computer scientist Alexander Ollongren has developed an entire language (Lincos) based on this idea. But my personal opinion is that mathematics may be a hard way to describe ideas like love or democracy. "

" Disasters happen. We still have no way to eliminate earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, floods or droughts. We cope as best we can by fortifying ourselves against danger with building codes and levees, and by setting aside money to clean up afterwards. "

" If this is the only planet on which not only life, but intelligent life, has arisen, that would be very unusual. "

" Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts. "

" While it may be disappointing, I have to confess to people who ask for my insights on the meaning of it all that astronomy doesn't provide any clearly useful data on matters of sin and souls. "

" Three-fourths of the universe is hydrogen, and oxygen is incredibly abundant, too. So H2O is something you can find nearly everywhere. "

" Very few societies on Earth developed science as we know it today. On the other hand, the number is not zero - the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Maya did, among others. Once invented, science proved so useful that it spread like mold on a petri dish. "

" Admittedly, it would take industrial-grade chutzpah and a massive dose of malevolence for anyone to bulldoze the spot where Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle lander. But even innocent visits could be damaging. "

" I think a lot of kids are interested in two science subjects: dinosaurs and aliens. The reason is almost genetic; we're hard-wired to be interested in things that might be a little dangerous. "

" Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate. "

" We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars - the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys. "

" If the cosmos isn't finite, then far, far away, floating duplicates of your brain - with all its experiences, thoughts, and emotions - are occasionally (and temporarily) thrown together by the random combining of atoms. Such 'Boltzmann brains,' as they're called, are a disturbing consequence of an unlimited universe. "

" It will be the mother of all telescopes, and you can bet it will do for astronomy what genome sequencing is doing for biology. The clumsy, if utilitarian, name of this mirrored monster is Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. You can't use it yet, but a peak in the Chilean Andes has been decapitated to provide a level spot for placement. "