universe Quotes

Certainly the history of astronomy shows that every time we thought we were special, we were wrong.

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

If the cosmos isn't finite, then far, far away, floating duplicates of your brain - with all its experiences, thoughts, and emotions - are occasionally (and temporarily) thrown together by the random combining of atoms. Such 'Boltzmann brains,' as they're called, are a disturbing consequence of an unlimited universe.

The most attractive habitats for synthetic sentience might be the vicinities of exceptional sources of energy - for example black holes, or even the neighbourhoods of large stars, which routinely boil off the energy of ten thousand suns. These are the destinations they may seek.

Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.

Astronomers still can't decide what the shape of our universe is. Is it closed and finite, which is to say, is there a countable tally of all the galaxies that exist, even beyond the ones we can see? Or is it infinite? The latter possibility is still on the table.

We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars - the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys.

Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.'s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special - it's some sort of miracle.

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.

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.