Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy.Seth Shostak
Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens' emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.Seth Shostak
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
We haven't yet found a speck of evidence for biology on another world, so we have no objective way to judge whether life is a onetime fluke or a near-inevitable phenomenon.Seth Shostak
This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.Seth Shostak
It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.Seth Shostak
The bottom line is that finding orphan planets - small, faint, and located who-knows-where - is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few.Seth Shostak
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.Seth Shostak
Five centuries ago, Copernicus upset humanity's applecart with the news that the Earth is not the center of the cosmos. It could be that, before you've paid off your house, we'll learn that the universe is not the center of the universe, either!Seth Shostak
The limitless content of our universe might be only one instance of a large (and possibly infinite) number of other universes.Seth Shostak
