Seth Shostak Quotes

Stars, of course, are too hot to support life, so wherever life might exist in the universe, it has to be on planets or moons that are warmed, but not incinerated, by the stars they travel around.

One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it - in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them - that's huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us.

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.

There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.

I think Pluto has to be considered among the places in the solar system that are possible homes for life.

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

Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.

I believe that there may be intelligent life on other planets.

The question we ask is - if there is life on other planets, should we expect it to be based on the same molecules, i.e. be universal - or should we expect it to depend on the local conditions, i.e. on the planet's geochemistry. So to find out, we try experiments on biomolecules, starting with such geochemistry conditions.

The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.

It might be arrogant to think that we're the only living creations in all of the solar systems that there are. Space is so vast.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.'s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special - it's some sort of miracle.

Wherever you are on Earth, there is more life present than in the rest of the known universe.

Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

I believe in aliens. I think it would be way too selfish of us as mankind to believe we are the only lifeforms in the universe.

We can never prove that we're alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we're not.

I haven't a clue if there is life on other planets but I'd be charmed if we found a unicellular organism on Mars. It would change our whole concept of life on Earth.

Wonder if there is life on another planet? Let's suppose there is. Suppose further, that only one star in a trillion has a planet that could support life. If that were the case, then there would be at least 100 million planets that harbored life.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. It may have involved a fluke so rare that it happened only once in the entire galaxy. On the other hand, it may have been almost inevitable, given the right environment.

I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.

I do definitely believe that there is life away from this planet. I mean, we've kind of established that with the fact that we found bacteria on meteorites, and we've kind of used that to backtrack and show how this Earth, this planet, could have formed the ability to sustain life in the first place.

With 'Extinction Machine,' I wanted to start some conversations about whether we're alone in the universe and what that might mean.