Frank Drake Quotes

Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal.

The pulsar map is not dangerous at all. It will likely never even be seen by extraterrestrials.

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

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.

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.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

The one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals.

Give consideration to the fact that alien astronomers could have scrutinized Earth for more than 4 billion years without detecting any radio signals, despite the fact that our world is the poster child for habitability.

I do not believe that anyone from outer space has ever visited the Earth.

No company is hiring anyone to search for messages from aliens. Most people don't seem to think there's much benefit to it. The lack of interest is, I think, because most people don't realize what even a simple detection would really mean.

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.

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.

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.'

There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.

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.

It would seem staggeringly arrogant to think we were the only ones in the universe, but at the same time, I don't know if contact has been made yet or not because you think something like that would be hard to cover up. I'm still on the fence. I keep an open mind about all of these things.

In the field of astronomy in the mid-'60s, quasars were very sexy objects - gigantic, star-like masses about which little was known. I was a graduate research student at Cambridge working towards my Ph.D. and chose quasars as the subject for my thesis. Part of my project involved surveying the sky for them using a radio telescope.

I believe there's other forms of intelligence in the universe. I've seen and heard some pretty convincing UFO stuff. Besides, if we're the most intelligent things in the universe... well, that's just depressing.

Galactic plankton is undoubtedly out there, but it's statistically highly likely there's also another intelligent civilisation out there somewhere. Unfortunately, the distances and time differences are so great, communication might remain impossible.

'Life in space is impossible,' we're warned, and amidst the hypnotic beauty of these heavens, we become painfully aware of what a hostile environment space is, how unforgiving, how unsympathetic to human desires.

I believe there's life on other planets, but I don't believe that UFOs are saucers from another world.

Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.

If I could live in space, I would definitely do that.

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

It's quite likely that planets and solar systems like ours could be forming in other galaxies in great numbers.