According to ‘Star Trek’ mythos, Starfleet Command – operational headquarters for a flotilla of craft that keep the cosmic peace – is located in San Francisco’s Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge (still carrying traffic, even in the 23rd century). Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right? Seth Shostak Read Quote
People don’t learn science in movies. You don’t go to the movies thinking, ‘I hope I learn some quantum mechanics this afternoon.’ But on the other hand, movies are instrumental and influential in getting young people interested in science. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Hollywood usually guesses that extraterrestrials would only be interested in one of three things: (1) They want to breed with us, because their own reproductive machinery is on the blink; (2) They want Earth’s resources; or (3) They want the Earth. All of it. Seth Shostak Read Quote
Three-fourths of the universe is hydrogen, and oxygen is incredibly abundant, too. So H2O is something you can find nearly everywhere. Seth Shostak Read Quote
Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens’ emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals. Seth Shostak Read Quote
Very few societies on Earth developed science as we know it today. On the other hand, the number is not zero – the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Maya did, among others. Once invented, science proved so useful that it spread like mold on a petri dish. Seth Shostak Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The mission of NASA’s Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass (‘transit’) in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds. Seth Shostak Read Quote
