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. Seth Shostak Read Quote
E.T.’ was far-fetched. ‘E.T.’ was this wimpy-looking kid that came to Earth to pick some plants, but he came from the Andromeda Galaxy to do that. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
On Mars, where the air is spare – a hundred times less dense than on Earth – someone could hear you scream. But you’d have to really strain to get anyone’s attention. On the Red Planet, where the wind is high-pitched and faint, even a symphony orchestra will sound as thin as cheap gruel. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 hour. It’s called the asthenosphere – a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth’s cool epidermis – the so-called tectonic plates. Seth Shostak Read Quote
The idea of close encounters of the zero’th kind – which is to say, not a close encounter at all, but simply uncovering evidence that someone’s out there – dates back to the Victorian era. Seth Shostak Read Quote
Battleship’ is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 Read Quote
While it may be disappointing, I have to confess to people who ask for my insights on the meaning of it all that astronomy doesn’t provide any clearly useful data on matters of sin and souls. Seth Shostak Read Quote
