Seth Shostak Quotes

Societies advance through innovation every bit as much as economies do.

We need to make a greater investment in human intelligence.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as the work of advanced biology?

The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

We should explore ways to make us a more amazing species. A more fascinating society. We should embrace our innovations and evolve with them.

We can go up or we can do down. I think generally the world is going on an upward swing. We're in a part of a cycle where people are discovering more. The communications are better. We're getting more into the subtle electricities that control the universe.

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.

All the modern devices we have enable us to investigate things and have enabled us to do better.

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.

The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold.

I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

My biggest resource is my mind.

This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

Everything that you are taking advantage of, inventing and using, is still a generation or two behind when it comes to the U.S. government.