Biology Quotes by Seth Shostak

10 Biology quotes by Seth Shostak

Seth Shostak’s ten brief comments explore the boundaries of biology, especially where it meets the search for extraterrestrial life. His perspective invites readers to consider the universal traits of living matter.

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A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it…

Seth Shostak

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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

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We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars -…

Seth Shostak

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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

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Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape.…

Seth Shostak

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The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that…

Seth Shostak

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Diminutive worlds are more likely to be rocky, and lapped by oceans and atmospheres. In the vernacular of 'Star Trek,' these would…

Seth Shostak

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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

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It will be the mother of all telescopes, and you can bet it will do for astronomy what genome sequencing is doing…

Seth Shostak

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The cosmos is three times as old as Earth. During most of creation's 14 billion year history, our solar system wasn't around.…

Seth Shostak

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Studying Sol's interior by looking for analogous patterns on its incandescent face is known as helioseismology, an active - if largely unpronounceable - research…

Seth Shostak

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Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered…

Seth Shostak

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As far as I can tell, the only unambiguous consequence of the claimed invasion of Earth by beings from another star system has been…

Seth Shostak

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Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400…

Seth Shostak

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Give consideration to the fact that alien astronomers could have scrutinized Earth for more than 4 billion years without detecting any radio signals, despite…

Seth Shostak

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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…

Seth Shostak

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Sure, nobody will make a fortune if we figure out why the Big Bang happened. But just about everyone would like to know.

Seth Shostak

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If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an…

Seth Shostak

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While I have always thought that the motivation for looking for E.T. was both self-evident and patently worthy, it's possible that I'm a victim…

Seth Shostak

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I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to…

Seth Shostak

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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…

Seth Shostak

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This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent…

Seth Shostak

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The most attractive habitats for synthetic sentience might be the vicinities of exceptional sources of energy - for example black holes, or even the…

Seth Shostak

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Buying insurance is no one's idea of fun. And it's especially easy to berate something as funky-sounding as writing checks to defend our neighborhoods…

Seth Shostak

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Plate tectonics is not all havoc and destruction. The slow movement of continents and ocean floors recycles carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans back…

Seth Shostak

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