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" Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories. "
Seth Shostak
Watching
Movies
Too Much
Related Quotes:
" Studying Sol's interior by looking for analogous patterns on its incandescent face is known as helioseismology, an active - if largely unpronounceable - research area that uses sound as a probe of our home star. "
Seth Shostak
Home
Studying
Research
" It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio. "
Seth Shostak
Science
Speech
Technology
" The cosmos is three times as old as Earth. During most of creation's 14 billion year history, our solar system wasn't around. Nonetheless, the early universe still had the right stuff for life, and contained worlds that were just as suitable for spawning biology and intelligence as our own. "
Seth Shostak
Intelligence
History
Life
" 'Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. "
Seth Shostak
Film
Obsession
Picture
" 'Eternal inflation,' as it's called - the endless generation of new universes - may be a hyper-cosmic imperative. It seems that it must happen. "
Seth Shostak
May
Generation
Inflation
" I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films. "
Seth Shostak
Got
Age
Time
" Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever. "
Seth Shostak
Learn
Creation
Understand
" Note to academics: Aristarchus' track record of astronomical research would probably have guaranteed him tenure somewhere, if tenure had been invented. His stack of reprints included measuring the distances of the Moon and Sun. "
Seth Shostak
Research
Moon
Somewhere
" Heads are a good deal, and I think they would be a common feature. It's hard to think of species that don't have heads, although there are some. It's good to have a head because it puts some of the sensory organs - eyes, ears, whiskers or whatever - next to the CPU, the brain. "
Seth Shostak
Hard
Think
Brain
" Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered them incapable of reproducing within their own species. But do extraterrestrial infants toddle through your neighborhood? "
Seth Shostak
Us
Too Much
Riding
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Reason
Two
Think
" Today's voguish threats, including climate change, population growth, massive war, and resource depletion, are all amenable to a fix if we act prudently. And even if we don't, these problems are incapable of obliterating all of humanity, let alone destroying the Earth. No, the real End of Days will happen slowly, as the Sun ages. "
Seth Shostak
Alone
Growth
Sun
" 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? "
Seth Shostak
Up
Stone
Pyramids
" I actually think the chances that we'll find E.T. are pretty good. "
Seth Shostak
Think
Find
Pretty
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Now
Brains
Imagine
" I you look at the drawings of aliens made by people who believe that Earth is under saucer attack, you'll quickly note that most of these invaders fit the Tinseltown mold. But you have to admit: the grays are highly anthropomorphic. "
Seth Shostak
Believe
Look
People
" There will be an end point to how good TV pictures can get. The boob tube has hugely benefited from the rapid advance of digital electronics. Consequently, the strategy for hardware has changed. In the old days, sets had to be as simple as Elmer Fudd to keep them inexpensive. All the technical 'smarts' were at the transmitter end. "
Seth Shostak
Simple
Strategy
End
" The bottom line is that finding orphan planets - small, faint, and located who-knows-where - is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few. "
Seth Shostak
Finding
Flame
Heart
" Every day, the temperature of Sol's surface increases by five billionths of a degree, a change of no consequence for thousands of millennia to come. But a few hundred million years from now, barring a fix by our descendants, this relentless heating will substantially change Earth's biosphere in ways that might not be survivable for us. "
Seth Shostak
Now
Fix
Every Day
" It's hardly a secret that I'm skeptical of declarations that the aliens are out and about on our planet. Still, I try to answer every one of these mails and phone calls because, after all, it's not a violation of physics to travel from one star system to another. "
Seth Shostak
Travel
Star
Physics
" If aliens are really hanging out in our 'hood, it's hard to imagine any other fact more worthy of study. If not, then why does such a large fraction of the populace insist on believing they're here? "
Seth Shostak
Study
Why
Believing
" Even if the Moon didn't exist - even if it had been vaporized billions of years ago by cantankerous Klingons - there would still be (somewhat lower) tides raised by the Sun. For creatures dependent on the oceans' ebb and flow, life could go on. "
Seth Shostak
Sun
Years
Moon
" Just knowing that there's somebody else out there - that what's happened on this planet has also happened in many other places - that might change our lives in a very subtle way, but it's interesting to know and worth looking for. "
Seth Shostak
Interesting
Change
Way
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Great
Time
Life
" Once typecast as the indispensable altarpiece of a well-appointed living room, TVs have infected every human environment. The average American household has more television sets than people. "
Seth Shostak
People
Living
Environment
" The total number of people that do a job that has the same description as mine in the entire world is fewer than 10. There's a lot of effort looking for life in space - that's a lot of what NASA does, but they're not necessarily looking for the kind of life that can hold up its side of a conversation. "
Seth Shostak
Life
Effort
Job
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Judge
Biology
Life Is A
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Way
Best
Building
" While I have always thought that the motivation for looking for E.T. was both self-evident and patently worthy, it's possible that I'm a victim of my own job description. Others don't inevitably agree. Some will opine that there are better ways to spend the money. "
Seth Shostak
Looking
Thought
Motivation
" Explorers tend to be the aggressive types - why else would they risk scurvy, mutiny and other bad things to go out there? So, you could say that any aliens that are actually moving and interested in going somewhere are likely to be more aggressive. But who knows? "
Seth Shostak
Say
Bad
You