One of the jovian moons, Europa, is coated with twice as much liquid water as is sloshing around our planet. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Disasters happen. We still have no way to eliminate earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, floods or droughts. We cope as best we can by fortifying ourselves against danger with building codes and levees, and by setting aside money to clean up afterwards. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Consider: The human genome consists of about 3.3 billion base pairs. Since there are only four types of pair, that amounts to 0.8 gigabytes of information, or about what you can fit on a CD. With a microwave radio transmitter, you could beam that amount of information into space in a few minutes, and have it travel to anyone at light speed. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
We can no better imagine what will be happening on the moon 500 years from now than Columbus could imagine contemporary Manhattan. Except to say that it will be a place familiar to billions of people. Seth Shostak Read Quote
