Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I actually think the chances that we'll find E.T. are pretty good.
Certainly the history of astronomy shows that every time we thought we were special, we were wrong.
The search for extra-terrestrial life is a failure until that moment when it suddenly becomes a success.
One of the jovian moons, Europa, is coated with twice as much liquid water as is sloshing around our planet.
We can never prove that we're alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we're not.
If this is the only planet on which not only life, but intelligent life, has arisen, that would be very unusual.
Sure, nobody will make a fortune if we figure out why the Big Bang happened. But just about everyone would like to know.
The limitless content of our universe might be only one instance of a large (and possibly infinite) number of other universes.
Jupiter, a world far larger than Earth, is so warm that it currently radiates more internal heat than it receives from the Sun.
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.
Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. Theyre about telling stories.
Three-fourths of the universe is hydrogen, and oxygen is incredibly abundant, too. So H2O is something you can find nearly everywhere.
Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.
Sure, our three-pound brains might be inadequate to understand the universe. But perhaps they're just good enough to build something that can.
When I was a kid, which was just after Edison invented moving pictures, there were films that involved aliens coming to Earth for bad purposes.
'Eternal inflation,' as it's called - the endless generation of new universes - may be a hyper-cosmic imperative. It seems that it must happen.
'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.
A practical way to travel between the stars is a must-have for space opera, and a sine qua non for our frequently vaunted future as a galactic society.
It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes - and each of these will have its own complement of planets.
Faith is a personal matter, and should never be a cudgel to stifle inquiry. We tried that approach about 1,200 years ago. The experiment was called the Dark Ages.
I still remember my dismay in the summer of 2007 when - for the first time in the history of planet Earth - America's share of auto production dropped below 50 percent.
The planets and moons of our solar system are blatantly visible because they reflect sunlight. Without the nearby Sun, these planets would be cryptic and dark on the sky.
We haven't yet found a speck of evidence for biology on another world, so we have no objective way to judge whether life is a onetime fluke or a near-inevitable phenomenon.
If you took all the sand from all the beaches, all the desserts, and all the oceans and called that the Universe, our whole solar system would be less than one grain of sand.
I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.
Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators.
Virtually any pointed edifice is considered a candidate for alien engineering. After all, how could the Egyptians or Mayans have possibly stacked up stone blocks into pyramids?
If gravity were somewhat stronger or weaker, stars wouldn't exist, and neither would you. And the same can be said of other constants of physics. Several have to be 'just right.'
No heating system can deliver perfectly uniform temperatures throughout a house, and drafts can magnify the perceived difference in temperatures. Try walking around with a thermometer.
Typically, only about 2 percent of the American populace tunes in to PBS's 'Nova' series - the most successful science show on the tube. 'Survivor' and 'X Factor' get twice the ratings.
Planets that don't currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life.
The ideas of science germinate in a matrix of established knowledge gained by experiment; they are not lonesome thoughts, born in a rarified realm where no researcher has ever gone before.
The space elevator's not just another competitive technology, promoted by people who simply like the idea of diminishing the luster of the thrusters. It would open wide the doors to space.
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.
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 to warp drive and some winsome space cadets.
Once typecast as the indispensable altarpiece of a well-appointed living room, TVs have infected every human environment. The average American household has more television sets than people.
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.
I think a lot of kids are interested in two science subjects: dinosaurs and aliens. The reason is almost genetic; we're hard-wired to be interested in things that might be a little dangerous.
Our brains are wired to interpret shapes as faces and bodies. That's why people see the Virgin Mary in the clouds or even in cheese sandwiches. It's your cytoplasm, not some strange ectoplasm.
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.
Everything you see is filtered through your visual system (imperfect) and your brain (also imperfect, despite what your mom told you). Witness testimony is the worst kind of evidence in science.
If aliens are really hanging out in our 'hood, it's hard to imagine any other fact more worthy of study. If not, then why does such a large fraction of the populace insist on believing they're here?
It's the default premise in science: If you observe something in nature only once, you assume that what you've seen is typical. That's because 'typical' is just another way of saying 'most probable.'
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.
It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.
We're not just any star stuff, most of which is humdrum hydrogen and listless helium. Our bodies include fancier ingredients like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and a few other herbs and spices.
Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.
This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.
In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up.
Forecasting Armageddon has become trendy of late, with a great deal of attention being given to an interpretation of the Mayan Calendar suggesting that Mother Earth is destined for doom in December of 2012.