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" Sure, nobody will make a fortune if we figure out why the Big Bang happened. But just about everyone would like to know. "
Seth Shostak
Will
Know
Why
Related Quotes:
" Forecasting Armageddon has become trendy of late, with a great deal of attention being given to an interpretation of the Mayan Calendar suggesting that Mother Earth is destined for doom in December of 2012. "
Seth Shostak
Mother
Attention
Great
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Progress
Knowledge
Experience
" Planets that don't currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life. "
Seth Shostak
Any
Mars
World
" In days gone by, scientists would speak solemnly about our solar system's 'habitable zone' - a theoretical region extending from Venus to Mars, but perhaps not encompassing either, where a planet would be the right temperature to have liquid water on its surface. "
Seth Shostak
Speak
Right
Solar
" In the four years since its launch, Kepler has chalked up 122 new and confirmed planets. It's also caught the scent of nearly three thousand additional objects, of which probably 80 percent or more will turn out to be other-worldly orbs. "
Seth Shostak
Three
Launch
New
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Space
Travel
Long
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Eagle
Even
Innocent
" The usual metric for whether a planet is habitable or not is to ascertain whether liquid water could exist on its surface. Most worlds will either be too cold, too hot or of a type (like Jupiter) that may have no solid surface and be swaddled in noxious gases. "
Seth Shostak
Will
Water
Like
" Most of the intelligence out there must be artificial intelligence. We keep looking for critters like us living on a planet like ours, where in fact the majority of the intelligence out there is not biological. That would be my argument. "
Seth Shostak
Looking
Argument
Living
" 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
" When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated. "
Seth Shostak
Win
Body
Brains
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Science
God
Problem
" The total funding of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the U.S. is 0.0003 percent of the tax monies spent on health and human services. And it's not even tax money. The SETI Institute's hunt for signals is funded by donations. "
Seth Shostak
Tax
Search
Intelligence
" As far as I can tell, the only unambiguous consequence of the claimed invasion of Earth by beings from another star system has been a nonstop torrent of TV specials. So if you're one of the many who believe the aliens are here, you really do have to admit this: They're the best houseguests ever. "
Seth Shostak
Earth
You
I Can
" The planets and moons of our solar system are blatantly visible because they reflect sunlight. Without the nearby Sun, these planets would be cryptic and dark on the sky. "
Seth Shostak
Sunlight
Sun
Dark
" 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
" Jupiter, a world far larger than Earth, is so warm that it currently radiates more internal heat than it receives from the Sun. "
Seth Shostak
Warm
World
Sun
" 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
" 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
" What's a space elevator? Simply described, it's a thin ribbon, about 3 feet wide and 60 thousand miles long, stretching upwards from the surface of the Earth. The lower end is bolted to a heavy anchor (think of an oil drilling platform), and the top is capped with a counterweight. "
Seth Shostak
End
Earth
Space
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Remember
Earth
Time
" The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as the work of advanced biology? "
Seth Shostak
Fire
Yourself
Work
" 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
" It's hard to imagine anything more interesting than learning how we're woven into the enormous tapestry of existence. Where did our universe come from? How special is our world, and how special are we? We allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to NASA, NSF and academia in search of the answers. "
Seth Shostak
Search
World
Learning
" 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? "
Seth Shostak
Social Media
Time
Burn
" Thanks to the fact that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, and invoking a bunch of Newtonian physics, you can deduce that our planet wobbles, too, taking roughly 26,000 years to trace out a small circle on the sky, a phenomenon known as precession. "
Seth Shostak
Sky
Perfect
Earth
" You may not see massive UFO exhibits at your local science museum, but there's no dearth of saucer stories infesting my email. Every day, I receive several reports of alien sightings, extraterrestrial plans for Earth, and agitated screeds about the reluctance of scientists to take the whole subject seriously. "
Seth Shostak
Science
Earth
Museum
" 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
" Given the tendency of many to picture God's realm as somewhere high above Earth - an idea that sounds suspiciously like the Greek stories of deities perched on inaccessible mountain tops - it may seem plausible to assume that astronomers have special insight. Well, of course they don't. "
Seth Shostak
Earth
Special
Picture
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Forget
You
Biology