Quotes About SETI

We'd be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.

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?

Part of the point of SETI has always been a search for answers about our own cosmic potential and destiny. If 'they' are out there, it means that there may be hope for us.

As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project.

There was a time when the government cut off funding to SETI, basically, and I thought it was something that should continue, and it was a very interesting scientific question.

People presume we've been somehow monitoring the entire sky at all frequencies, all the time, but we haven't yet been able to do any of those things. The fact is, all the SETI efforts to date have only closely examined a couple thousand nearby stars, and we're only just now learning which of those might have promising planets.

SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

The total funding of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the U.S. is 0.0003 percent of the tax monies spent on health and human services. And it's not even tax money. The SETI Institute's hunt for signals is funded by donations.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

Among the radio astronomers of SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - it's only sort-of a joke that the true hallmark of intelligent life is the creation of radio astronomy.

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.

Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.

Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie 'Contact,' which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.

Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate.