Yuri Milner Quotes

I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.

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.

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.

Within the scientific community, there is healthy skepticism. And the question is, 'How do you ever get to a meaningful null result? How long and how hard do SETI scientists have to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and find nothing before they say, 'There is nothing. We are alone.'

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

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.

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.

In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs.

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 believe that there may be intelligent life on other planets.

Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie 'Contact,' which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.

I grew up in this business... A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet... and to understand our place in the universe.

With the mission to Mars, the whole world wants to get involved. So we actually have 13 different space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration road map.

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

The future infrared space telescope will cover that area in a much more efficient manner.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

I think space exploration is very important. I think there is very intelligent life on Mars. I believe that Martians are spying on us from the bottom of the ocean.

I always have traveled with a camera throughout my life, but I always had my old 35mm film camera. When I was training to go into space, the only equipment there was a digital camera. I went through a fast-track class on Earth. It actually was fun, though I'm basically a dinosaur with computers.

'Intelligent Life' is kind of a companion piece to 'Safety Not Guaranteed.' Internally, it's a sci-fi romantic thriller.

Life science research can be done on multiple platforms. Since we have a very small number of people flying into space, the more people you have, the better.

Many of us in Congress have been calling on the Administration to articulate a bold mission for NASA. It seems that the President is answering that call. I wholeheartedly support his vision for going back to the moon, and from there to worlds beyond.

It's such a long mission and we get to spend so much time in space... we're doing such exciting research. And I don't want to overemphasize the life science research, but as a physician the life science research that we're doing is extremely exciting.

There's so much interest and curiosity about alien life, interstellar travel. It's always in the news.

SpaceX has reopened the cosmos, and the space race is back on, only this time it is in the private sector.

Micro satellites, about the size of a loaf of bread, are going to be going into space more and more.