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
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
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
Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy. – Seth Shostak
When I graduated high school, nearly a half-million people subscribed to ‘Popular Electronics’ magazine. Soldering up some radio or hi-fi amplifier on the basement workbench was not just a personal passion – a lot of young people were doing the same. The magazine expired in 1999 for lack of interest. – Seth Shostak
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
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
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
If the cosmos isn’t finite, then far, far away, floating duplicates of your brain – with all its experiences, thoughts, and emotions – are occasionally (and temporarily) thrown together by the random combining of atoms. Such ‘Boltzmann brains,’ as they’re called, are a disturbing consequence of an unlimited universe. – Seth Shostak
Frankly, I’ll believe in horoscopes the day I can describe my personality to an astrologer and they tell me what date I was born. – Seth Shostak
In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors. – Seth Shostak
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. – Seth Shostak
In 1908, there was a persuasive demonstration of the power of high-speed, low-mass asteroids in rural Siberia. The Tunguska impactor iced millions of pine trees and about a zillion mosquitoes – and was no larger than an office building. – Seth Shostak
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
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
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
There’s no doubt that the Moon is more than a handy night light and a hair restorer for werewolves. It’s responsible for the substantial amplitude of earthly ocean tides. These are of obvious influence if you’re a geoduck, a type of clam that people dig up at low tide. – Seth Shostak
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
America’s popular heroes have seldom been its great thinkers, and even less its scientists. The success of TV’s ‘Big Bang Theory,’ which seems to give the lie to this claim, is more the exception that proves the rule. – Seth Shostak
In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up. – Seth Shostak
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
Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion. – Seth Shostak
Consider that the overwhelming majority of those 40,000 near-Earth asteroids are small enough to fit on the parking lot at the mall. And while these rocky runts won’t cause Armageddon, they could still flatten such popular hominid hangouts as Manhattan or downtown Des Moines. – Seth Shostak
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
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
We’ll be ‘outsourcing’ our creativity and our thought processes to manufactured components that could be inconspicuously implanted beneath our coiffeurs. Welcome to the Borg. You might not be entirely comfortable with such cybernetic enhancements, but all the smart money says it’s going to happen. – Seth Shostak
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
A factory that can turn carbon nanotubes into a sheet a yard wide and long enough to stretch one-fourth of the way to the moon is not something you’ll find at your local industrial park. That’s the show-stopper for the space elevator. The ribbon. – Seth Shostak
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
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