Extraterrestrial Life Quotes

“I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.
Often, I'm asked next, "What do you really think?"
I say, "I just told you what I really think."
"Yes, but what's your gut feeling?"
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”
― Carl Sagan

“In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.”
― Michael Crichton

“It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.”
― Gregory Benford

“A more ambitious bet would be to learn from what we imagine a more mature civilization might have attempted. To take the small scientific leap and allow the possibility ‘Oumuamua was extraterrestrial technology is to give humanity the small nudge toward thinking like a civilization that could have left a lightsail buoy for our solar system to run into. It is to nudge us not just to imagine alien spacecraft but to contemplate the construction of our own such craft.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

“It amazes me how people can close their minds off to the size of the Universe. With billions of stars, millions of galaxies, and possibly a googol of planets, how can it be that human beings are the only thinking animal in creation?”
― Coriander Woodruff, Strange Tales of Floyd County, VA

“He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite--that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality. He hoped passionately that if they were to perish they would perish by the "unbodying" of the space-ship and not by suffocation within it. To be let out, to be free, to dissolve into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed to him at certain moments a consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth. And if he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

“Your story -my story, our story- began billions of years ago," she says. "But that probably doesn't come first to your mind when you wake up in the morning." A pause fills the air-conditioned room. "We need to change that."
[...]
"We are intimately connected with these faraways times and faraways places," she continues, "because it takes a cosmos to make a human".”
― Sarah Scoles, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

“Any life-form advanced enough to travel light-years through interstellar space would have nothing to learn by probing the rectums of farmers in Kansas.”
― Dan Brown

“We humans, believe we know it all. When you think about the vastness of the universe, you begin to realise we know nothing other than the limitations of our own environment.”
― Torron-Lee Dewar, Creativity is Everything

“All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever—proof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“We’re searching for intelligent, conscious, tool-making beings that have developed a language we’re capable of understanding. We’re searching for intelligent conscious, tool-making, communicative beings that live in social groups (so they can reap the benefits of civilization) and that develop the tools of science and mathematics.
We’re searching for ourselves . . .”
― Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

“Her body is a philosophical novel that proves the existence of extraterrestrial life forms.”
― Curtis tyrone jones

“instructive to view things from ‘Oumuamua’s vantage point. From that object’s perspective, it was at rest and our solar system slammed into it. Or, in a way that works both metaphorically and, maybe, literally, perhaps ‘Oumuamua was like a buoy resting in the expanse of the universe, and our solar system was like a ship that ran into it at high speed.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

“While man sleeps, strange things flock to nature.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Persons such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan say that tens of thousands (maybe tens of millions) of planets will fulfill the conditions for the support of life. And then they take the rather deceptive step from the ‘possibility of life’ to the ‘inevitability of life’ by such connivance as would shame a crooked gambler. They posit towering numbers of ‘civilizations’ on those ‘possibility-of-life planets’, at least half of them to be more advanced than the Civilization of Earth and Humankind.
But there is a strong element of Advocacy Science in this. There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything, not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them.
Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction.”
― R.A. Lafferty, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

“It is irrelevant whether or not there are other forms of life in the Galaxy or in other galaxies. The fact that we are here provides an 'existence proof as it is called in mathematics. To say that we are an accident of nature is to miss the point. The laws of nature are presumably eternal and immutable. They do not change in mid-stream and suddenly acquire the ability to create a pretty toy if circumstances arise.”
― Jamal Nazrul Islam, The Ultimate Fate of the Universe

“... what bothered them more were the pink slugs twenty centimeters long they found eating old carcasses. The slugs would attack anything and dissolved living flesh on contact.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“The plants here aren't like anything on Earth," I tried to explain one night. "They have cells I can't explain. On Earth, all seeds have one or two embryonic leaves, but here they have three or five or eight."

"And RNA," Grun said, "not DNA. Nothing has DNA except us.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“We had already realized from the disaster on Mars that transplanting Earth ecology wouldn't work. Crops would not grow without specific symbiotic fungi on their roots to extract nutrients, and the exact fungi would not grow without the proper soil composition, which did not exist without certain saprophytic bacteria that had proven resistant to transplantation, each life-form demanding its own billion-year-old niche. But Mars fossils and organic chemicals in interstellar comets showed that the building blocks of life were not unique to Earth. Proteins, amino acids, and carbohydrates existed everywhere. The theory of panspermia was true to a degree.

I had found a grass resembling wheat on our first day on Pax, and with a little plant tissue, a dash of hormone from buds, and some chitin, we soon had artificial seeds to plant. But would it grow? Theory was one thing and farming was another.

Then a few days before the women had died from poisoned fruit, Ramona and Carrie had seen the first shoots, ...”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“If one day there is only one person left living in the world, that person will no longer have a message to humanity, but only a message to extra-terrestrial beings!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Some scientists are open to the idea that aliens brought the fundamental particles of life from outer space, but not to believe in an intelligent being, Who has given existence to fallible creatures like humans. The Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, along with Leslie Orgel proposed that life may have been purposely spread by an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“Maybe the aliens are looking for the civilisations that don’t send out the SETI signals.”
― J.L. Haynes

“Instead of being happy by satisfying our ego through saying that there is only life in our world in this universe, we should be happy by getting rid of our fear of being alone in the universe through saying that there is life in many places in this universe!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Know with your mind that there is life in many places in the universe, but in your heart love and protect the world as if there is no life in the universe except the earth!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“We exist in this universe because it was possible for us to exist, otherwise we could not exist! It was possibleness that transformed us into reality! Aliens exist in this universe because it was possible for them to exist, just as it was possible for us to exist. Possibleness transformed aliens from a mere possibility to reality, just as it transformed us from a mere possibility to reality!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“To think that there are no primitive or intelligent life forms outside the world means to have never grasped the ability of this universe we live in to make what happens in one place possible in another!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Is there life on earth? Yes there is! Are there special molecules that create life on Earth that do not exist in the universe? No there's not! The materials that are here are also in the universe, the materials that are in the universe are also here! Conclusion: There is life on Earth, and there is life in the universe! Forget the question of whether there is life in the universe; now look for the answer to how we will meet these extraterrestrial beings!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Finding just one flower instead of thousands of crocodiles on an unknown planet would make human beings much happier because flowers symbolize the things that make a person most human: Elegance, serenity, peace, beauty, art, love!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“We'll never get to discover other life forms or other life forms that know we exist will never visit this galaxy because we still bicker over simple stuff... Damn... Conflict, jealousy and pettiness over every minute thing instead of clapping and appreciating one another... Building one another.... All we posses is self entitlement because we think we are at the centre of everything... Some light years away from now, yes light years... If I ever make it back, I'd want to witness how humanity has progressed. The kind of vitriol over things people shouldn't sweat over is so retrogressive!”
― Robert Kodingo