Seth Shostak Quotes

Dreams of warp drives and hyperspace are just that - dreams.

A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light.

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space-each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

It's feasible that we'll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them. We don't now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learning fast how to get somewhere few think possible.

If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space.

You don't go into space just for the science. Economically, it is not worth it. I think the reason we should be in space is for the exploration; it's the human endeavour.

Mankind will not forever remain on Earth but, in the pursuit of light and space, will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space.

I believe that the only way that the human race is gonna survive is to start colonizing space and setting up colonies on the moon, and then space stations.

If we can clean up our world, I'll bet you we can achieve warp drive.

When we started out in '64, um, I was playing Number One, which was a woman second in command of a star ship.

Human uploads have such a natural advantage over present-day people in the environment of space, it's exceedingly unlikely flesh-and-blood beings will ever engage in interstellar travel.

While human space travel is daunting, machines - with their indefinitely long lifetimes - could travel the galaxy. It might make little difference to them that bridging the distance from one star to the next could take hundreds of thousands of years or more.

I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space.

Who doesn't want to fly around in a spaceship?

Look how far the human race has come in terms of air and space travel in the last hundred years. So in the next couple of thousand years, you've got to believe that we're going to be able to do all kinds of amazing things.

Earth is the nest, the cradle, and we'll move out of it.

I used to love the 'Star Trek' movies, 'Wrath of Khan' and stuff like that. Loved those movies when I was a kid. And 'Star Wars' obviously was hands-down probably - I mean I had the sheets. I was a big fan of that.

Rocket scientists agree that we have about reached the limit of our ability to travel in space using chemical rockets. To achieve anything near the speed of light we will need a new energy source and a new propellant. Nuclear fission is not an option.

Star Trek's genial premise is that the cosmos is flush with intelligent species, and our descendants will interact with them face-to-face, thanks to warp drive and some winsome space cadets.

The Space Program is an investment of the nation’s future…. Humans will not be confined to this planet forever.

There are many in the field of cosmology, who believe as I do, that finding ways to travel great distances will be essential to keeping human kind alive in an aging universe.

I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.

When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.

Everyone gets very excited about the idea of space travel, but... it's not going to be everybody that gets to go.

I'd love to serve on the Enterprise.