Seth Shostak Quotes

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.

We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.

We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.

Man will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.

When we explore other planets, we learn a lot about our own.

Jupiter, Pluto, pick a planet: we can go there. I just got a bit more work to do in the music industry, and we're going to space, baby.

I'd love to go into space again if there were a mission to Mars. I'd also love to go to a completely different planetary system, out of our solar system.

You see billions and billions of stars and recognize that you know some of those have planets, too, and maybe there's life out there, and this is just one of billions of galaxies... and so it gives you this huge perspective of how far we potentially have to go for real exploration.

I would love to set foot on another planet - lunar or Mars or somewhere.

As a planetary system, Saturn holds the greatest promise for answering questions that have a far broader scientific reach than Saturn itself.

There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.

Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.

The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.

I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.

In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York!

Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.

When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.

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.

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.

It feels great to discover a planet, just like any discovery in science, except that it has more of the feel of exploration - you can go back and look at it. However, I can never visit.

I've always been interested in space and the idea of exploration in that area since I was a child growing up through the '60s.

But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.