American - Scientist | -
Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators.
Seth Shostak
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I actually think the chances that we'll find E.T. are pretty good.
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Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated.
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We're not just any star stuff, most of which is humdrum hydrogen and listless helium. Our bodies include fancier ingredients like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and a few other herbs and spices.
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Clearly, enriching the cosmos with heavy elements takes a while. So there's inevitably an interval between the sterile aftermath of the Big Bang and a time when the cosmic chemistry set had enough ingredients to make rocky planets (and squishy biology).
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Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.
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I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films.
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I think a lot of kids are interested in two science subjects: dinosaurs and aliens. The reason is almost genetic; we're hard-wired to be interested in things that might be a little dangerous.
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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.
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Five centuries from now - barring unimaginable catastrophe - the moon will be developed real estate. There's economic incentive to exploit the moon - the helium-3 will be useful in powering fusion reactors, and the rare earth elements could supplant the limited terrestrial supply of these materials.
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We can no better imagine what will be happening on the moon 500 years from now than Columbus could imagine contemporary Manhattan. Except to say that it will be a place familiar to billions of people.
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'What was there before the Big Bang?' That's a question that both kids and adults love to pose to anyone who seems sympathetic. After all, if the universe has only been around for roughly 14 billion years, isn't it legitimate to ask what was in existence before the mother-of-all-events cranked up the cosmos?
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