Search for Intelligent Life Quotes

The Eerie Silence: are we alone in the universe?

I think anybody would have to be with out common sense to think there weren't aliens. There are billions of planets, and I am convinced Earth is not the only one that's inhabited. It would be quite an ego trip to think that. I think about it all the time.

"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.

Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?

I believe that we're not alone. How can we be alone in an infinite universe? I'm using the word 'alien' with a little trepidation because I know that sparks so many different versions of that word, and there are so many different images that come into one person's head when someone says it.

The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?

The hardware and the software used in the Breakthrough project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, so they too can search for intelligent life.

It's only fashion that has said the pendulum has swung from extreme skepticism about extraterrestrial life to extreme credulity. The truth is somewhere in between.

In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs.

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