Paul Allen Quotes

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 conquest of space is not merely a technological project of interest to a handful of select scientists and specialists, valuable though that research and information may be.

While NASA talks about 'Are we alone?' as a number one question, they are putting zero money into searching for intelligent life. There's a big disconnect there.

Looking down the road, space exploration and the benefits it yields - in medicine and information technology - should not be overlooked.

I think a scientist's job is to explore the Universe, to explore the cosmos around us. People always want to know - why is that useful? Well, on just pure fundamental grounds, on some level it's like art, it's like umm, music, it's aesthetics, it's like philosophy. You want to know where you are in the Universe.

While I have always thought that the motivation for looking for E.T. was both self-evident and patently worthy, it's possible that I'm a victim of my own job description. Others don't inevitably agree. Some will opine that there are better ways to spend the money.

We're all interested in life outside of Earth. We all have a fascination with what's out there because we don't really know.

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 am very excited to be supporting one of the world's most visionary efforts to seek basic answers to some of the fundamental question about our universe and what other civilisations may exist elsewhere.

With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe something would have come through. Today, I really believe we are unique.

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.

As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.

It's hard to imagine anything more interesting than learning how we're woven into the enormous tapestry of existence. Where did our universe come from? How special is our world, and how special are we? We allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to NASA, NSF and academia in search of the answers.

despite its apparent impracticality, the Administration values discovery-oriented science, and aims to continue to support the grand quest for knowledge about the universe at the largest and smallest scales.

We are not particularly interested in the prestige of space, but in the scientific aspects of it.

When we explore other planets, we learn a lot about our own.

We had 83 different space research projects on my last space flight in '98, and they covered the whole gamut.

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

Are we alone? Many, many people on planet Earth want to know. We are on the cusp of being able to answer that question... because of the investments we're making in space technology.

I'm a real nerd for science. I love Neil deGrasse Tyson and 'Cosmos' and all that.

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.

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.

Life outside of Earth is probably going to be really hard to find.

It's clear that the only thing that is inhibiting us from doing further human exploration of space is money and the will to do it.

Theoretical physics hardly requires any research funding, so I never felt the need. The overall government and institutional support has been good enough for my work.