Seth Shostak Quotes

Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.

The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually.

Prebiotic chemistry on other worlds is going to be common. Plenty of small rocky planets will have similar chemistry. It's almost a given.

If we do find ET, we will at least have something in common with them. They may live on planet Zog and have seven tentacles, but they will be made of the same kinds of atoms as us. If they have eyes, they will gaze out on the same cosmos as we do. They will, like us, trace their origins back to a 'Big Bang' 13.8 billion years ago.

The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.

Earlier generations of stars in the galaxy could well have had planets. But really, there was only hydrogen and helium to work with, so they'd all be gas giants and not small, rocky planets.

It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there've been Bangs in the past, and there will be Bangs in the future.

If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.

We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

We people of the Earth exist because our potential was there in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, as the universe exploded into being.

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.

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.

Even to make the first cell possible, stellar space required to be swept of matter, suns must needs be broken up, and planets cool, the agents of geology labour millennium after millennium at the unfinished earth to prepare a material resting-place for the coming guest. Consider all this, and judge if Creation could have a sublimer meaning, or the Human Race possess a more splendid genesis.

Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.

You could think of the galaxy as a sort of stove with lots of pots on it, and the pots are the interstellar medium, like a chicken broth getting stronger with every reduction. Every time a supernova goes off and sends its heavy elements out into the interstellar medium, we cook up a stew that's better and better for solar systems and life.

Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.

Once we get beyond Mars, which formed from the same stuff as Earth, the likelihood that life is similar to what we find on this planet is very low.

I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.

Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron which this universe had never known. ... Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood.

All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star stuff.

Once you've got the makings of a star, gravity draws leftover gas and dust into a giant swirling disk. The dust continues to stick together, clumping into rocky asteroids, which eventually become orbiting rocky planets. And voila: a solar system!

We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star. We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.