Life Detection Quotes

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.

The total number of people that do a job that has the same description as mine in the entire world is fewer than 10. There's a lot of effort looking for life in space - that's a lot of what NASA does, but they're not necessarily looking for the kind of life that can hold up its side of a conversation.

Perhaps we've never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there's no sign of intelligent life.

How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.

If we find life out there, and it's not us, we will deem it not intelligent. But what may be equally as likely is that we find life that's vastly more intelligent than we are. If that's the case, we are putty in their hands.

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

Where there's water on Earth, you find life as we know it. So if you find water somewhere else, it becomes a remarkable draw to look closer to see if life of any kind is there, even if it's bacterial, which would be extraordinary for the field of biology.

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.

Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: The first time that any signs of extraterrestrial life had ever been detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we're not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.

As far as I'm concerned, Enceladus has become the go-to place in our solar system for issues bearing on extraterrestrial life. It's a great place to examine extraterrestrial organic chemistry that is water-based and, therefore, like biotic chemistry on Earth.

To unambiguously settle the questions of whether there was life on Mars, it will take scientists down on the surface.

I think living things can recognize the movement of other living things, and all the best animators in the world can't quite capture that something.

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.

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.

We're being very careful that we don't send a spacecraft to Mars with the intention of detecting Martian life - and find out that we detected the Earth life that we took with us.

Certainly for me, as an astrobiologist, science fiction has played an important role. One of the quandaries of our field is that we are trying to study and search for something - life - that we can't define in a rigorous way. We only have one example of a biosphere, so we can't really give a good definition.

It may be that no life is found, Which only to one engine bound Falls off, but cycles always round.

Sciences are being unified by the search for life in the universe.

We don't know how many planets we're going to have to examine before we find life, and not finding it on 10 or 100 doesn't mean it's not there. This may be very tricky.

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.

Spectroscopy can probably answer the question, 'Is there anybody out there?' Are we alone?

When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.