Seth Shostak Quotes & Sayings (Page 11)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Of course, Sol is a big ball of hot gas, but one that - thanks to its endlessly boiling innards - shakes and vibrates. By studying patterns on the Sun's surface, astronomers can learn much about Sol's internal construction.”

“Star Trek's genial premise is that the cosmos is flush with intelligent species, and our descendants will interact with them face-to-face, thanks to warp drive and some winsome space cadets.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The space elevator's not just another competitive technology, promoted by people who simply like the idea of diminishing the luster of the thrusters. It would open wide the doors to space.”