Seth Shostak Quotes

I study the universe. It's the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time.

I've always been consumed by things that are out of this world, like space and moons.

Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

As marvelous as the stars is the mind of the person who studies them.

Space is an inspirational concept that allows you to dream big.

There's a bigger universe at hand.

There are 100 Billion starts in the galaxy. That used to be an astronomical number. It's less than the national deficit. Now we should calm them economical numbers.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

I can't say I've ever had a dream about space or that I ponder it all the time.

I'm interested in the cosmos. I want to know what's out there and how connected we are.

I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.

My biggest love is still planets and stars. If I hadn't become an artist, I'd be an astronomer because I still love it so much.

There is a distinct layer between the Earth and the universe, which is extremely black. Slowly, the entire universe starts to look 3D, like you can fly through it rather than this sphere of blackness overhead. And when you're above the atmosphere, there isn't water vapour in the air to make things foggy.

I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, it's about destinations.

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'm not really into sci-fi movies, but I'm into the science of space a lot. I love astronomy and thinking about the nothingness of the everythingness of space.

It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.

I actually believe more in outer space in Virginia, because I can look up at the sky and count the stars.

NASA is my favorite website. The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.

By the time I finished high school, I knew I wanted to become an astronomer. By the time I finished college, I knew I wanted to be part of the American space program. And that's exactly what I did.

It now seems logical that all the stars, like our own sun, must have formed with a system of planets around them.

My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.

Scientists normally like to do experiments. You know, they like to mix this with that and see what happens. They like to take this thing and poke it and see how it reacts. In astronomy, we can't do that. The stars, the planets, the galaxies, are so far away that we just look at them, and we have to learn things by looking at them.

The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.