Quotes.gg
Home
Tags
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy
Imprint
Made by
Last Media
Seth Shostak
Popular Posts
#Tags
Neil Armstrong was no Christopher Columbus. In most respects, he was better. Unlike the famous fifteenth century seafarer, Armstrong knew where he landed. He also spent his time in public service, not in jail, and his passing was marked by world-wide encomiums. He ended his days as a celebrated explorer rather than a royal inconvenience.
- Seth Shostak
#Famous
#Public Service
#Service
#Time
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
#Alien
#Diet
#Presence
#Sky
#Something
The Moon stabilizes Earth's obliquity. Well, almost. The tilt actually varies between 22 and 24.5 degrees - and the variation is enough to induce such environmental inconveniences as the occasional ice age. Without the Moon, it might be much worse.
- Seth Shostak
#Age
#Earth
#Enough
#Environmental
#Moon
I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.
- Seth Shostak
#High School
#High
#Me
#Reading
#School
The strongest signals leaking off our planet are radar transmissions, not television or radio. The most powerful radars, such as the one mounted on the Arecibo telescope (used to study the ionosphere and map asteroids) could be detected with a similarly sized antenna at a distance of nearly 1,000 light-years.
- Seth Shostak
#Distance
#Powerful
#Radio
#Television
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
#Dark
#Sky
#Solar System
#Solar
#Sun
By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?
- Seth Shostak
#Brain
#Computers
#Home
#Power
#Smart
The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there's a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the coast of Spain before turning back to say, 'Nothing out there!'
- Seth Shostak
#Intelligence
#Mind
#New
#Search
#Silence
'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
#Cosmos
#Existence
#Love
#Pose
#Universe
Diminutive worlds are more likely to be rocky, and lapped by oceans and atmospheres. In the vernacular of 'Star Trek,' these would be M-class planets: life-friendly oases where biology could begin and bumpy-faced Klingons might exist.
- Seth Shostak
#Begin
#Biology
#Exist
#More
#Planets
Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind.
- Seth Shostak
#Believe
#Computers
#Thinking
#Time
#Will
The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the stars in their traces, was sufficiently impressed by the scale and regularity of the universe to ascribe it all to God.
- Seth Shostak
#God
#Religion
#Science
#Stars
#Universe
The principal reason for the universe's poker face is that its constituents are far away. Stars careen through space, and galaxies spin at speeds thousands of times faster than a jet plane. But given their distance, you'd need the patience of Job to notice much change in their appearance or position.
- Seth Shostak
#Change
#Face
#Patience
#Space
#Universe
Humans have existed only for the last 0.001 percent of cosmic time. All of which says that - unless the Homo sapiens brain is the one-and-only instance of cogitating machinery - nearly all the intelligence that's out there is beyond our level. And that intelligence is more than just a little bit beyond.
- Seth Shostak
#Beyond
#Brain
#Intelligence
#More
#Time
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
#Attention
#Calendar
#Earth
#Great
#Late
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
#Dating
#Game
#Quiz
#Real
#Time
'Dating Game' wasn't social commentary, political analysis, Shakespearean-level drama or even blunt-force comedy. It was just the televised equivalent of meeting someone at a bar. But it appealed to our most basic Darwinian instinct: selecting a good mate. You can't go wrong when a show's premise is hard-wired into human DNA.
- Seth Shostak
#Dating
#Drama
#Game
#Good
#Political
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
#Alien
#Digital
#Gone
#Power
#Television
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
#Eyes
#Home
#Mission
#Stars
#World
We can never prove that we're alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we're not.
- Seth Shostak
#Alone
#Never
#Prove
#Telescope
#Universe
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
#Earth
#Far
#More
#Sun
#World
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.
- Seth Shostak
#Neighbors
#Old
#Stars
#Sun
#Way
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
#History
#Intelligence
#Life
#Universe
Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.
- Seth Shostak
#Eternal
#Future
#Less
#Million
#New
#Plate
#Without
Plate tectonics is not all havoc and destruction. The slow movement of continents and ocean floors recycles carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans back into the atmosphere. Without this slow speed carbon cycle, Earth's temperatures would cool dozens of degrees below your comfort zone.
- Seth Shostak
#Back
#Comfort
#Cool
#Earth
#Slow
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
#Distance
#Heart
#Orphan
#Wise
#Work
The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.
- Seth Shostak
#Earth
#Moon
#Place
#Solar System
#Solar
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
#Carbon
#Herbs
#Hydrogen
#Oxygen
#Spices
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
#Experience
#Knowledge
#Science
#Society
Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens' emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.
- Seth Shostak
#Radio
#Space
#Television
#War
#World
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
#Launch
#New
#Space
#Three
#Will
Each year, thousands of UFOs are sighted and reported, which is an impressive tally of unidentified aerial phenomena. Surveys show that roughly one-third of the populace believes that at least some of this sky show is due to extraterrestrial spacecraft, here to probe our airspace and, when that proves boring, our bodies.
- Seth Shostak
#Boring
#Show
#Sky
#Space
#Year
The math is dead simple: it seems that the frequency of planets able to support life is roughly one percent. In other words, a billion or more such worlds exist in our galaxy alone. That's a lot of acreage, and it takes industrial-strength credulity to believe it's all bleakly barren.
- Seth Shostak
#Alone
#Life
#Simple
#Space
#Support
It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes - and each of these will have its own complement of planets.
- Seth Shostak
#Milky Way
#Own
#Space
#Way
#Will
The stars look the same from night to night. Nebulae and galaxies are dully immutable, maintaining the same overall appearance for thousands or millions of years. Indeed, only the sun, moon and planets - together with the occasional comet, asteroid or meteor - seem dynamic.
- Seth Shostak
#Moon
#Night
#Space
#Stars
#Together
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
#Health
#Intelligence
#Money
#Search
#Tax
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
#Biology
#Fire
#Intelligence
#Road
#Work
Load More
Your experience on this site will be improved by allowing cookies.
Allow cookies