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" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Kid
Just
Pictures
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" 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
" 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
" Five centuries ago, Copernicus upset humanity's applecart with the news that the Earth is not the center of the cosmos. It could be that, before you've paid off your house, we'll learn that the universe is not the center of the universe, either! "
Seth Shostak
Humanity
You
Universe
" 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
" I think there's a lot of intelligence out there, but that's just my guess. Question is: Are they peaceable or hostile? You could say that the peaceable ones are just going to stay at home and play with their Nintendos, so if you do meet any of them, they might be hostile. "
Seth Shostak
Intelligence
Home
You
" The mission of NASA's Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass ('transit') in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds. "
Seth Shostak
World
Stars
Lift
" 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
" Ever since the infamous quiz show scandals of the 1950s, the feds had insisted that TV game shows be honest - or that at least they didn't cheat. So as a 'Dating Game' bachelor, I didn't know what I was going to be asked. The other bachelors and I were required to concoct our answers in real time. "
Seth Shostak
Honest
Know
Real
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Music
Culture
Earth
" This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box. "
Seth Shostak
Box
You
NASA
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Build
Earth
Nature
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Evolution
Prey
Landscape
" 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
Like
Just
Star
" 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
" A practical way to travel between the stars is a must-have for space opera, and a sine qua non for our frequently vaunted future as a galactic society. "
Seth Shostak
Society
Space
Stars
" In general, when moviemakers talk to scientists, they usually see them as a resource to solve particular technical problems or script problems for them. So, something like: what sort of weaponry would aliens be able to wield? "
Seth Shostak
Talk
Resource
Problems
" 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
" Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.'s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special - it's some sort of miracle. "
Seth Shostak
Earth
Mission
Galaxy
" One of the jovian moons, Europa, is coated with twice as much liquid water as is sloshing around our planet. "
Seth Shostak
Much
Our
Planet
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
American
Image
iPhone
" 'What was there before the Big Bang?' That's a question that both kids and adults love to pose to anyone who seems sympathetic. After all, if the universe has only been around for roughly 14 billion years, isn't it legitimate to ask what was in existence before the mother-of-all-events cranked up the cosmos? "
Seth Shostak
Pose
Years
Universe
" 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. "
Seth Shostak
Look
Important
Good
" 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
" Lamentably, alien audiences may be frustrated by the switch to digital television. That's because the transmitter power for DTV is fairly evenly spread across the spectrum. The spikiness is gone, and from afar, the attention-grabbing squeals of analog television's carriers have been replaced by DTV's smooth, low hiss. "
Seth Shostak
Digital
Power
Alien
" It's always a tough call deciding whether, as a scientist, you should argue publicly with the creationists. It's a dilemma that I encounter frequently in another subject area: Does it make sense to bandy words with someone from the UFO community? "
Seth Shostak
Someone
You
Words
" 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
" It seems that 'rocket scientist' is a job category that's here for the long haul, like 'mortician.' But all this activity masks an important point: rockets are not a terribly efficient way to lift things into space. "
Seth Shostak
Job
Space
Important
" 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
" 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
" 'E.T.' was far-fetched. 'E.T.' was this wimpy-looking kid that came to Earth to pick some plants, but he came from the Andromeda Galaxy to do that. "
Seth Shostak
Pick
Some
Earth