SETI, SETI@home (and coffee) quotes

SETI, SETI@home (and coffee) quotes
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Richard's Maneuver: "I also had problems accessing the SETI@home website, with - apparently - the Cloudflare service failing to get me a secure connection and giving me a 'forbidden' plain http connection instead. So I went out to the pub, and it was fine when I got back."

<Ageless> (about the SETI@home 20th Anniversary t-shirts https://i.imgur.com/EZPhX3Y.jpg) Nice good quality shirts. Just those confusing little white specks [nftr: the t-shirt's stars] on there make me think I have dandruff where I don't. :-)

"To all explorers, we are just a dust particle in the universe; make it count." - Méndez & González-Espada (2016)
Bad Religion - "Hello Cruel World" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GLVDRWVPtA

"The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance of success is zero." - Philip Morrison & Guiseppe Cocconi, Nature, 1959

"All this fear mongering of aliens in movies, this is not from any actual knowledge of aliens, it's from actual knowledge of humans." - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“I don’t think you can ask the question of life beyond Earth and stop at microbes.”  - Jill Tarter in "University research center will search for extraterrestrial intelligence" https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/university-research-center-will-search-extraterrestrial-intelligence

"I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with great caution." - Wernher Von Braun

<ProzacAddict> Would you like your coffee small large or intravenous ?

Ah, morning. First, coffee. Then, adulting.

Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.

Why, yes, I could start my day without coffee. But I like being able to remember things like how to say words and put on pants

Shhhh, don’t disturb me, I’m busy changing coffee into badassery

I don’t have enough coffee or middle fingers for today

My time-travel machine is instant coffee in a microwave oven.

"The difference between seing nothing but a pebble and reading the history of the Cosmos inscribed inside it is Science." - Ann Druyan https://www.instagram.com/p/BvzENmghUZA/

"You can’t kill a legend with anything as mundane as facts." - Molecular biologist Ross Barnett

“In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.” – Carl Sagan

“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.” -- Isaac Asimov

“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” - Carl Sagan, Contact

“We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.” - Jill Tarter

“Thinking about SETI requires us to abandon all our presuppositions about the nature of life, mind, civilization, technology and community destiny. In short, it means thinking the unthinkable.” - Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“Your story -my story, our story- began billions of years ago," she says. "But that probably doesn't come first to your mind when you wake up in the morning." A pause fills the air-conditioned room. "We need to change that." [...] "We are intimately connected with these faraways times and faraways places," she continues, "because it takes a cosmos to make a human" - Sarah Scoles, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

“One thing we’ve learned in the last 500 years of astronomy: Every time we thought we were a miracle, we were wrong.” - Bill Retherford, Little Green Men

“Indeed, much of Tarter’s pitch, whether at speaking engagements or within SETI promotional materials, has a soaring, cinematic feel. Among her most captivating lines: “We are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolve for so long that it begins to ask where it came from. This is us, contemplating ourselves.” - Bill Retherford, Little Green Men

“The conflict came to a boil in October 2006, at a SETI meeting in Valencia, Spain, where there was a debate over active SETI and a contentious vote over new guidelines for initiating broadcasts from Earth. Later that month, Nature published a scolding editorial criticizing the SETI community for a lack of openness. According to the Nature editors, the risk posed by active SETI is real. It is not obvious that all extraterrestrial civilizations will be benign—or that contact with even a benign one would not have serious repercussions for people here on Earth… yet the Valencia meeting voted against trying to set up any process for deliberating over the style or content of any spontaneous outgoing messages. In effect, anyone with a big enough dish can appoint themselves ambassador for Earth. The SETI community should assess [the risks] in a discussion that is open and transparent enough for outsiders to listen to and, if so moved, to actively participate. As a lifelong SETI enthusiast, I found it disconcerting to see the field so publicly chewed out.” - David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“I began to see this as a series of dilemmas nested like Russian dolls. Can today’s SETI community agree on a policy about active SETI? Even if collectively forged and broadly ratified, would such an agreement actually control or change global behavior, as perceived from the outside? How would you get everyone to go along? Can human society in some sense agree on active SETI? Should we, as a species, cautiously try to hide our presence, or hopefully announce ourselves to the universe?” - David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Way back, about a century ago, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues, taking a lunch break from the Manhattan Project, found themselves discussing life in the cosmos. Some younger scientists claimed that amid trillions of stars there should be countless living worlds inhabited by intelligent races, far older than ours. How interesting the future might be, with others to talk to! Fermi listened patiently, then asked: “So? Shouldn’t we have heard their messages by now? Seen their great works? Or stumbled on residue of past visits? These wondrous others … where are they?” His question has been called the Great Silence, the SETI Dilemma or Fermi Paradox. And as enthusiasts keep scanning the sky, the galaxy’s eerie hush grows more alarming.” -  David Brin, Existence

“Ultimately there may be no completely rational basis on which to decide. We can discuss probabilities and scenarios and continue to gather evidence, but the decision whether or not to make ourselves known may come down to what kind of universe we think we’re living in. I still feel that we cannot be frightened of the universe. I believe that we should start pursuing active SETI, reaching out to our space brethren and sistren, letting them know they are not alone and seeing if we can spark some cosmic conversation. There is no way to defend ourselves from, or hide from, some superadvanced entity that means to do us” - David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“In 1961, Frank Drake hosted the first SETI conference at Green Bank. There were only eleven in attendance, including Philip Morrison; Carl Sagan; Melvin Calvin (who, during this conference, received a call awarding him a Nobel Prize!); astronomer Su-Shu Huang, who invented the notion of habitable zones around stars; and neuroscientist John Lilly. Swept up in optimism and camaraderie, the participants formed a whimsical organization called the Order of the Dolphin, after Lilly’s work toward communicating with these sleek, bright creatures who seemed to encourage our hope for conversing with other intelligent species.” -  David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“My conclusion is a startling one. I think it very likely—in fact inevitable—that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature, a conclusion that has obvious and far-reaching ramifications for SETI.” - Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.” – Carl Sagan,

“Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of the billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things within that enormous immensity.” - Werner von Braun

“If it is just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” – Carl Sagan

“I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” – Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

"In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.” - Richard Dawkins

“It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.” – Carl Sagan

“In our time this search [for extraterrestrial life] will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.“ — Ray Bradbury

“It is unnatural in a large field to have only one shaft of wheat, and in the infinite Universe only one living world.“ — Metrodorus of Chios

“The key to SETI is to guess the type of communication that an alien society would use. The best guesses so far have been that they would use radio waves, and that they would choose a frequency based on ‘universal’ knowledge—for instance, the 1420 MHz hydrogen frequency. But these are assumptions formulated by the human brain. Who knows what sort of logic a superadvanced nonhuman life form might use? … Just 150 years ago, an eyeblink in history, radio waves themselves were inconceivable, and we were thinking of lighting fires to signal the Martians.“ — David E. Fisher

“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” – Arthur C. Clarke

“To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet, only one grain will grow.” — Metrodorus of Chios, 4th century BCE

“A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence… It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.” — Carl Sagan, ‘The Quest for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.’, Smithsonian magazine, May 1978

“Why a journey into space? Because science is now learning that the infinite reaches of our universe probably teem with as much life and adventure as Earth's own oceans and continents. Our galaxy alone is so incredibly vast that the most conservative mathematical odds still add up to millions of planets almost identical to our own — capable of life, even intelligence and strange new civilizations. Alien beings that will range from the fiercely primitive to the incredibly exotic intelligence which will far surpass Mankind. (The Hollywood Reporter, Sept. 8, 1966)” - Gene Roddenberry

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