A Quote by Seth Shostak
The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there's a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the coast of Spain before turning back to say, 'Nothing out there!'
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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.
I'm the guy who'll drive 250 miles tonight and be at the gym tomorrow at 10 A.M., when people are still sleeping in. I'm the guy who'll fly to Australia and find a gym. Fly back and first thing I do off the plane is work out before I shower or eat.
Every day, getting up early in the morning before much traffic, my wife takes me 10 miles from home, drops me off, and I have to get back.
The silence was killing me. And that's all there ever was. Silence. It was all I knew. Keep quiet. Pretend nothing had happened, that nothing was wrong. And look how well that was turning out.
Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.
Im the guy wholl drive 250 miles tonight and be at the gym tomorrow at 10 A.M., when people are still sleeping in. Im the guy wholl fly to Australia and find a gym. Fly back and first thing I do off the plane is work out before I shower or eat.
The Self is the one thing you can discover, not by travelling miles, but by being very still inside your own being and saying to the Supreme,
Yes, absorb me.
In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.
The history taught in our schools is scandalous. We grew up believing that Columbus actually discovered America. We still celebrate Columbus Day. Columbus was after one thing only - gold.
More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.'
All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they-like Columbus-didn't discover what they expected to discover, and didn't discover what they started out to discover, doesn't trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forget that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.
Within the scientific community, there is healthy skepticism. And the question is, 'How do you ever get to a meaningful null result? How long and how hard do SETI scientists have to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and find nothing before they say, 'There is nothing. We are alone.'
When I'm channel surfing, and 'Silence of the Lambs' comes on, I have trouble turning it off. I wouldn't say that about 'Beautiful Mind.' It's a good movie, but I'm much more in awe of what Jonathan Demme did with 'Silence of the Lambs.'
Most of the intelligence out there must be artificial intelligence. We keep looking for critters like us living on a planet like ours, where in fact the majority of the intelligence out there is not biological. That would be my argument.
We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.
Why wasn't Christopher Columbus able to discover Spain?
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