Seth Shostak Quotes

In the four years since its launch, Kepler has chalked up 122 new and confirmed planets. It's also caught the scent of nearly three thousand additional objects, of which probably 80 percent or more will turn out to be other-worldly orbs.

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.

In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in 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.

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.

There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.

We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.

America's love affair with traveling into outer space is deeply entrenched.

Ultimately, what we're looking for in the long run is to find other Earth-like planets.

We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.

I would love to do something with space. I'm obsessed with it. I just can't stop reading about it or watching videos about it or listening to TED Talks about it.

The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.

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

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.

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

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.

Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.

In order to be stimulated or moved in the future, we probably have to go into space and look at our world from there.

There is no limit to what astrophysicists can do. We can be very curious.

No one planet can tell us everything about the universe, but Neptune seems to hold more than its share of information about the formation of our own solar system - as well as the solar systems beyond.

Theoretically, there are planets with an environment that can support life. As yet there is no evidence that there indeed is life on other planets. It's only a matter of time before we get to know.

I think that space exploration as a broad activity is the most important things that humans can do. I've always found it fascinating, interesting, compelling, and I have a drive to go out into space.

Our field is very focused on finding Earth 2.0, and anything we can do to narrow the search is helpful.

A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.