Typically, only about 2 percent of the American populace tunes in to PBS's 'Nova' series - the most successful science show on… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Even if the Moon didn't exist - even if it had been vaporized billions of years ago by cantankerous Klingons - there… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
[O]ne might ask why, in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, the aliens are so intent on coming to Earth… — Seth Shostak Aliens Copy Share Image
Clearly, unless thinking beings inevitably wipe themselves out soon after developing technology, extraterrestrial intelligence could often be millions or billions of years… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
The majority of my UFO diet consists of reports describing suspected encounters. This is not surprising, as there are thousands of sightings… — Seth Shostak Alien Copy Share Image
Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories. — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
The bottom line is that the position of the Sun relative to the stars slowly changes for any given date, and over… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
The total number of people that do a job that has the same description as mine in the entire world is fewer… — Seth Shostak Conversation Copy Share Image
Many people suggest using mathematics to talk to the aliens, and Dutch computer scientist Alexander Ollongren has developed an entire language (Lincos)… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Most of the things at the zoo don't look like us. We're one design that works. Our chimp pals sort of look… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Consider that the overwhelming majority of those 40,000 near-Earth asteroids are small enough to fit on the parking lot at the mall.… — Seth Shostak Armageddon Copy Share Image
The math is dead simple: it seems that the frequency of planets able to support life is roughly one percent. In other… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Despite tantalizing suggestions of fossilized microbes in meteorites, puzzling and possibly biogenic methane gas in the martian atmosphere, and a long-standing controversy… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Thanks to the fact that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, and invoking a bunch of Newtonian physics, you can deduce that… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Hollywood usually guesses that extraterrestrials would only be interested in one of three things: (1) They want to breed with us, because… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
About the only things that are unique to Earth are our biota and our culture. If aliens ever come here, they'd most… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
It's the default premise in science: If you observe something in nature only once, you assume that what you've seen is typical.… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Just knowing that there's somebody else out there - that what's happened on this planet has also happened in many other places… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
The idea of close encounters of the zero'th kind - which is to say, not a close encounter at all, but simply… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Once typecast as the indispensable altarpiece of a well-appointed living room, TVs have infected every human environment. The average American household has… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Our brains are wired to interpret shapes as faces and bodies. That's why people see the Virgin Mary in the clouds or… — Seth Shostak Body Copy Share Image
Television is ephemeral, a fact that some will find reassuring. But earthlings will continue to pump the kilowatts into the ether. And… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
I still remember my dismay in the summer of 2007 when - for the first time in the history of planet Earth… — Seth Shostak America Copy Share Image
We haven't yet found a speck of evidence for biology on another world, so we have no objective way to judge whether… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars -… — Seth Shostak Astronomy Copy Share Image
The number of habitable worlds in our galaxy is certainly in the tens of billions, minimum, and we haven't even talked about… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
It seems that 'rocket scientist' is a job category that's here for the long haul, like 'mortician.' But all this activity masks… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Clearly, enriching the cosmos with heavy elements takes a while. So there's inevitably an interval between the sterile aftermath of the Big… — Seth Shostak Aftermath Copy Share Image
Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape.… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
America's popular heroes have seldom been its great thinkers, and even less its scientists. The success of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' which… — Seth Shostak America Copy Share Image
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… — Seth Shostak Astronomy Copy Share Image
Most of the intelligence out there must be artificial intelligence. We keep looking for critters like us living on a planet like… — Seth Shostak Argument Copy Share Image
Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
If you took all the sand from all the beaches, all the desserts, and all the oceans and called that the Universe,… — Seth Shostak Beach Copy Share Image
NASA's Office of Commercial Exploration has been concerned about protecting the landing zones where humans first walked on the Moon, and one… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the… — Seth Shostak Copy Share Image
![“[O]ne might ask why, in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, the aliens are so intent on coming to Earth at all. It would be as if every vertebrate in North America somehow felt drawn to a particular house in Peoria, Illinois. Are we really that interesting?” quote by Seth Shostak](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/223/seth-shostak-2047_aliens_o-ne-might-ask-why-in-a-galaxy-of-a-few_2866062.png)
