Seth Shostak Quotes

The one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals.

Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room. Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.

I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.

Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal.

Television is ephemeral, a fact that some will find reassuring. But earthlings will continue to pump the kilowatts into the ether. And eventually, when those signals have washed over a few hundred thousand star systems, someone may notice.

Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie 'Contact,' which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.

We can never prove that we're alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we're not.

Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question.

We don't know how to identify intelligence over interstellar distances, so what we do instead is use technology for a proxy.

We send messages all the time, free of charge. There's a big shell out there now, 80 light-years around us. A civilization only a little more advanced than we are can pick those things up.

I think probably the discoveries made by Hubble Space Telescope have been very dramatic, very amazing.

Dad was a world-famous astronomer; Mom was the artist who drew the iconic Pioneer plaque.

The pulsar map is not dangerous at all. It will likely never even be seen by extraterrestrials.

In 1957, I was studying the Pleiades star cluster at Harvard University's radio observatory. On one occasion, we saw an added feature in the data. It turned out to be an amateur radio enthusiast near the observatory, but at the time, I thought we had detected clear evidence of another civilisation.

No company is hiring anyone to search for messages from aliens. Most people don't seem to think there's much benefit to it. The lack of interest is, I think, because most people don't realize what even a simple detection would really mean.

I believe movies are showing us what we already know with aliens especially, so when we do get to meet them it's not a big shock.

Galactic plankton is undoubtedly out there, but it's statistically highly likely there's also another intelligent civilisation out there somewhere. Unfortunately, the distances and time differences are so great, communication might remain impossible.

I'd like to jump a couple hundred years into the future and work with the scientists who are getting back the first information from our probes to planets orbiting nearby stars.

I think obviously there is some kind of life form somewhere else. Whether it looks like the creature in 'Alien Autopsy,' I'm not sure.

People presume we've been somehow monitoring the entire sky at all frequencies, all the time, but we haven't yet been able to do any of those things. The fact is, all the SETI efforts to date have only closely examined a couple thousand nearby stars, and we're only just now learning which of those might have promising planets.

I do suspect we are going to get signs of life elsewhere, but how well prepared are we for this? Have we thought how we will approach them? We need to start thinking about that.

Part of the point of SETI has always been a search for answers about our own cosmic potential and destiny. If 'they' are out there, it means that there may be hope for us.

Within the scientific community, there is healthy skepticism. And the question is, 'How do you ever get to a meaningful null result? How long and how hard do SETI scientists have to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and find nothing before they say, 'There is nothing. We are alone.'

Hubble knows there is interesting stuff out there, but Hubble isn't quite big enough.

I think the International Space Station is providing a key bridge from us living on Earth to going somewhere into deep space.