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Seth Shostak Quotes


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Quotes by Seth Shostak

Showing 151-160 of 176 Quotes by Seth Shostak

The idea of close encounters of the zero'th kind - which is to say, not a close encounter at all, but simply uncovering evidence that someone's out there - dates back to the Victorian era.

~Seth Shostak

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If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an hour. It's called the asthenosphere - a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth's cool epidermis - the so-called tectonic plates.

~Seth Shostak

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Plate tectonics is not all havoc and destruction. The slow movement of continents and ocean floors recycles carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans back into the atmosphere. Without this slow speed carbon cycle, Earth's temperatures would cool dozens of degrees below your comfort zone.

~Seth Shostak

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Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.

~Seth Shostak

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Planets that don't currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life.

~Seth Shostak

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Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.

~Seth Shostak

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When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.

~Seth Shostak

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Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine.

~Seth Shostak

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We'll be 'outsourcing' our creativity and our thought processes to manufactured components that could be inconspicuously implanted beneath our coiffeurs. Welcome to the Borg. You might not be entirely comfortable with such cybernetic enhancements, but all the smart money says it's going to happen.

~Seth Shostak

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Sure, our three-pound brains might be inadequate to understand the universe. But perhaps they're just good enough to build something that can.

~Seth Shostak

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Scientist

Born: Unknown

Links

Find Seth Shostak on Amazon

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