Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

It's hard enougth to find intelligent life right here in Washington!

First and foremost, The Quiet Invasion is a first contact story. What would we do if we actually found evidence of alien life out there? It's also about politics.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.

The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.

My only hope is that every other alien civilization isn't doing exactly what we are doing because then everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.

I can conceive of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a so-called superior (or, if you wish, advanced) technology in outer space.

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it.

I think there's a lot of intelligence out there, but that's just my guess. Question is: Are they peaceable or hostile? You could say that the peaceable ones are just going to stay at home and play with their Nintendos, so if you do meet any of them, they might be hostile.

If little green men land in your back yard, hide any little green women you've got in the house.

Most of the intelligence out there must be artificial intelligence. We keep looking for critters like us living on a planet like ours, where in fact the majority of the intelligence out there is not biological. That would be my argument.

Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.

That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.

I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician.

Tom Daschle is one of the smartest guys in Washington.

Among the radio astronomers of SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - it's only sort-of a joke that the true hallmark of intelligent life is the creation of radio astronomy.

I think if aliens came to Earth, we would laugh. If there was an alien technology, we would laugh.

Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule.

We have never denied that it is possible, indeed probable, that other forms of life, even intelligent life, exist in the universe. But this is different from the belief that we are now being visited by extraterrestrial beings in spacecraft, that they are abducting people, and the there is a vast government cover-up.

It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are space ships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our Earth for centuries. I think that they possibly have been sent out to conduct systematic, long-range investigations, first of men, animals, vegetation, and more recently of atomic centers, armaments an centers of armament production.

The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

The energy requirements for interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades. If they want to make contact, they would make contact; if not, they would save their energy and go elsewhere.

and we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.