cosmic solitude Quotes

The Eerie Silence: are we alone in the universe?

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

"Are we alone in the universe?" This is a question which goes back to the dawn of history, but for most of human history it has been in the province of religion and philosophy. Fifty or something years ago, however, it became part of science.

The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.

The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.

I suppose my interest in looking for life elsewhere in the universe really dates back to my teens. What teenager doesn't look up at the sky at night and think am I alone in the universe? Well most people get over it, but I never did and though I made a career more in physics and cosmology than astrobiology I've always had a soft spot for the subject of life because it does seem so mysterious.

The Stars. Jared slept beneath them, uneasy in the rustling leaves. From the battlements Finn gazed up at them, seeing the impossible distances between galaxies and nebulae, and thinking they were not as wide as the distances between people. In the study Claudia sensed them, in the sparks and crackles on the screen. In the prison, Attia dreamt of them, She sat curled on the hard chair, Rix repacking his hidden pockets obsessively with coins and glass discs and hidden handkerchiefs. A single spark flickered deep in the coin Keiro spun and caught, spun and caught.

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy - a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at?

You are down there alone, the stars seemed to say to him. And we are up here, in our constellations, together.

At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.

After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.

And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: I'm lonely - I'll make me a world.

I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.

Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in the Twilight Zone.

People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.

The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.

That is a big question we all have: are we alone in the universe? And exoplanets confirm the suspicion that planets are not rare.