Extraterrestrial Quotes

The best proof of extraterrestrial intelligence is that they haven't contacted us. ~ Bill Watterson

For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved. ~ Charles Baudelaire

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth. ~ Christopher Wren

Twisting space-time into knots requires energy on a scale that will not be available within the next several centuries or even millenia-if ever. Even if all the nations of the world were to band together to build a machine that could probe hyperspace, they would ultimately fail. And, as Guth points out, the temperatures necessary to create a baby universe in the laboratory is 1,000 trillion trillion degrees, far in excess of anything available to us. In fact, that temperature is much greater than anything found in the interior of a star. So, although it is possible that Einstein's laws and the laws of quantum theory might allow for time travel, this is not within the capabilities of earthlings like us, who can barely escape the feeble gravitational field of our own planet. While we can marvel at the implications of wormhole research, realizing its potential is strictly reserved for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. ~ Michio Kaku

Evans: We don't know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity. ~ Liu Cixin

It's only fashion that has said the pendulum has swung from extreme skepticism about extraterrestrial life to extreme credulity. The truth is somewhere in between. ~ Paul Davies

Early SETI efforts were marked by overly optimistic estimates of the probable number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest and to take a more down-to-earth view. Earth may be more special, and intelligence much rarer, in the universe than previously thought.

Skeptical Inquirer Volume 30.3, May / June 2006 ~ Peter Schenkel

Until a few years ago, a man who had no debts was considered virtuous, honest, and hardworking. Today, he's an extraterrestrial. Whoever does not owe, does not exist. I owe, therefore I am. Whoever is not credit-worthy deserves neither name nor face. The credit card is proof of the right to exist; debt, something even those who have nothing have. Every single person or country that belongs to this world has at least one foot caught in this trap. ~ Eduardo Galeano

I don't believe in a conspiracy to hide the existence of extraterrestrial life. ~ David Duchovny

Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered them incapable of reproducing within their own species. But do extraterrestrial infants toddle through your neighborhood? ~ Seth Shostak

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

For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan

Well then, it's time to introduce the world to a little bit of extraterrestrial awesomeness. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Abstract: Careful review of a vast array of relevant evidence clearly leads to the conclusion that some unidentified flying objects are intelligently controlled vehicles whose origin is outside our solar system. All the arguments against the extraterrestrial origin seem to be based upon false reasoning, misrepresentation of evidence, neglect of relevant information, ignorance of relevant technology, or pseudo sophisticated assumptions about alien appearance, motivation, or government secrecy ... ~ Stanton T. Friedman

I'm not at liberty to discuss the governments knowledge of extraterrestrial UFO's at this time. I am still personally being briefed on the subject! ~ Richard M. Nixon

The US Airforce assures me that UFO's pose no threat to National Security. ~ John F. Kennedy

After investigating the UFO phenomenon all over the world, after studying thousands of pages of released government documents, and interviewing eyewitnesses and insiders, including generals, intelligence officers, cosmonauts and astronauts, military and commercial pilots, I do not have the shadow of a doubt anymore that we are indeed visited by extraterrestrial intelligences. The evidence just does not allow another conclusion. ~ Michael Hesemann

We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars. ~ Carl Sagan

There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer, looked at who is in each group, you would see something strange indeed: those trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies - the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them; tribal societies; and first nations in Canada. They're not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they're really trying to do something about it. ~ Noam Chomsky

Each year, thousands of UFOs are sighted and reported, which is an impressive tally of unidentified aerial phenomena. Surveys show that roughly one-third of the populace believes that at least some of this sky show is due to extraterrestrial spacecraft, here to probe our airspace and, when that proves boring, our bodies. ~ Seth Shostak

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

A multitude of harlequin lifeforms bobbed and twirled and played in the depths of the Atlantic. Pink cucumbers with thorny backs. Algae. Starfish. Annelids with simple brains and a hundred toes. Sponges - like yellow, swollen hands - sucked in water and pushed out oxygen. Most amusing were the mysterious buggers who had no likeness on the previous earth; tiny beasts with exotic exoskeletons engraved with deep grid-like patterns, snails with horns, and slithering plants that looked like magenta weeping willows. ~ Jake Vander Ark

Her body is a philosophical novel that proves the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

What a pity that the Earth, in spite of modern transport, still remains unknown to most. We are all extraterrestrials on Earth! Soon after we set out to explore the world, we realize that we have been living on an unknown planet all along. Paradoxically, the moment one becomes a world-traveler, he simultaneously becomes an extraterrestrial exploring an alien planet. ~ Nicos Hadjicostis

It was the darndest thing I've ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and it was about the size of the moon.. We watched it for ten minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing's for sure, I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen unidentified objects in the sky. ~ Jimmy Carter

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers. ~ Joan Didion

Clearly, unless thinking beings inevitably wipe themselves out soon after developing technology, extraterrestrial intelligence could often be millions or billions of years in advance of us. We're the galaxy's noodling newbies. ~ Seth Shostak

Once He created the Big Bang ... He could have envisioned it going in billions of directions as it evolved, including billions of life-forms and billions of kinds of intelligent beings. As a theologian, I would say that the proposed search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is also a search of knowing and understanding God through his works - especially those works that most reflect Him. Finding others than ourselves would mean knowing Him better. ~ Theodore Hesburgh

My imagination? No, I don't think it's VIVID at all. On the contrary, it's not nearly potent enough. My poor imaginative faculties have always needed ... extentions. That's why I'm here with you. You're smiling again, or rather you're SMIRKING. Funny word, smirk. Rather like an extraterrestrial surname. Simon Smirk. How do you think that sounds? ~ Thomas Ligotti

There are more than 100 first- and second- hand witnesses to the retrieval of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and at least four extraterrestrial bodies from a crash which occurred in July, 1947, 75 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico; written and videotaped testimony from several first-hand witnesses who are respected military officers have been obtained. ~ Steven M. Greer

On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it. ~ Terence McKenna

Then she snapped her fingers and we were standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon's icy crust. I ~ Ernest Cline

We are dealing with a yet unrecognized level of consciousness, independent of man but closely linked to the earth ... I do not believe anymore that UFOs are simply the spacecraft of some race of extraterrestrial visitors. This notion is too simplistic to explain their appearance, the frequency of their manifestations through recorded history, and the structure of the information exchanged with them during contact. ~ Jacques Vallee

I certainly believe in aliens in space, and that they are indeed visiting our planet. They may not look like us, but I have very strong feelings that they have advanced beyond our mental capabilities. ~ Barry Goldwater

Maybe it's impossible to spend time with Patrick Stewart and not have the conversation move to the extraterrestrial. ~ Stephen Rodrick

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

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead. ~ Don DeLillo

Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth. ~ Timothy Leary

My new love poem about black girls
How amazingly beautiful is the star brilliance of your amazing dark skin, regal skin color, for women it goes more than anything in the world, it decorates them as the most valuable decoration in the world, more expensive and more luxurious than it is in the world, this amazing color poetizes and praises their divine beauty. How sweet and gentle is its color, how beautifully it glitters in the light showing all indescribable beauty, all these beautiful overflows of skin tones are so beautiful as the brilliance of millions of diamonds, so beautiful, it is cosmically beautiful, it is extraterrestrial beauty, higher aesthetics, as if priceless painting or through It is a beautiful sculpture personifying sensual femininity. You are perfect no doubt, you are a beautiful flower of love, an eternal flame of magical passion. In your figure so much hot playful cat's grace of a lioness, like a dance, as an unforgettable melody of love, a relationship with you is the most romantic movie in the world. ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

Me and Katy look adorkable in extraterrestrial
highway shirts. You would just look stupid. You can thank me later. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Even if alien visitors did decide to drop by this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon - aka Yawnsville, USA - as their point of first contact. Not unless their plan was to destroy our civilization by wiping out our least interesting locales first. ~ Ernest Cline

The Visitors reported by contactees, abductees, and other witnesses may, in fact, be a highly advanced amphibian or reptilian culture from an extraterrestrial world, who evolved into the dominant species on their planet millions of years ago and who have interacted in Earth's evolution as explorers, observers, caretakers, and genetic engineers. ~ Brad Steiger

Whether I was cooped up in my attic-cum-lab or trailing her scent through the rooms of the cabin with all but a tinfoil hat, she hung over me, extraterrestrial in both omnipresence and the ability to give me chills. ~ Brittany Newell

It seemed there was an announcement every five minutes from the mythical conductor, imparting sagacious gems such as "large items should be placed in the overhead luggage racks", or that "passengers should report any unattended items to the train crew as soon as possible". I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon? ~ Gail Honeyman

The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there's a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the coast of Spain before turning back to say, 'Nothing out there!' ~ Seth Shostak

Angels are not merely forms of extraterrestrial intelligence.
They are forms of extra-cosmic intelligence. ~ Mortimer Adler

Water on Mars isn't the only thing that they're going to find. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human. ~ David Eagleman

But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. ~ Liu Cixin

The others have made governments of this earth
keep the secret of their existence.
I would ... and perhaps you should.
If you wanna tell world about the secret, they will silence you.
If you don't give shit about the secret, then you just save their expenses. ~ Toba Beta

You have to think if we've been visited by extraterrestrial life, it was like a zookeeper walking into the chimp enclosure: He looks around, takes some pictures, then leaves without interacting significantly with the environment. Meanwhile the chimps have no idea what the fuck just happened. ~ J. Richard Singleton

Blacker than the night, the wedge penetrated the darkness. An F 117 raced by, the roar from its engines screaming through the interior of the chopper, and then it sliced away a piece of sky and disappeared into the void.
-Narrator, Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project ~ Daniel P. Douglas

Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones. Imagine explaining to an extraterrestrial visitor the concept of a horse. It would take some time. If the next thing you tried to explain were the concept of a zebra, the conversation would be shorter. You would simply point out that a zebra is a lot like a horse but with black and white strips. Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else. ~ Scott Adams

It is striking that the observational search for extraterrestrial life began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope, and with the greatest theoretician of the age. ~ Carl Sagan

In our time the search for extraterrestrial life will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there. ~ Ray Bradbury

The apparent incompatibility between the abundance of habitable planets in our Galaxy and the lack of extraterrestrial visitors, known as the Fermi paradox, suggest the existence of what Hanson calls a "Great Filter," an evolutionary/technological roadblock somewhere along the developmental path from nonliving matter to space-colonizing life. If we discover independently evolved primitive life in our Solar System, this would suggest that primitive life is not rare, and that the roadblock lies after our current human stage of development-perhaps because assumption 1 is false, or because almost all advanced civilizations self-destruct before they are able to colonize. I'm therefore crossing my fingers that all searches for life on Mars and elsewhere find nothing: this is consistent with the scenario where primitive life is rare but we humans got lucky, so that we have the roadblock behind us and have extraordinary future potential. ~ Max Tegmark

Kauffman was in awe when he realized all this. Here it was again: order. Order for free. Order arising naturally from the laws of physics and chemistry. Order emerging spontaneously from molecular chaos and manifesting itself as a system that grows. The idea was indescribably beautiful.

But was it life? Well no, Kauffman had to admit, not if you meant life as we know it today. An autocatalytic set would have had no DNA, no genetic code, no cell membrane. In fact, it would have had no real independent existence except as a haze of molecules floating around in some ancient pond. If an extraterrestrial Darwin had happened by at the time, he (or it) would have been hard put to notice anything unusual. Any given molecule participating in the autocatalytic set would have looked pretty much like any other molecule. The essence was not to be found in any individual piece of the set, but in the overall dynamics of the set: its collective behavior. ~ M. Mitchell Waldrop

If you haven't said 'I love you' to someone today, do it. You won't always be happy, but you should try to be. Don't be too afraid of germs. Those people have no fun. Remember to look around sometimes. You might see something you haven't seen before or at the very least avoid being hit by a flying object. Speaking of flying objects, don't spend your life looking for extraterrestrial life, unless you work for NASA. Remember that you always have to cooperate with someone. Life is an endless negotiation. Play fair. Stay out of jail. Don't live in the past. Eat breakfast. It really is the most important meal of the day. Try to make new friends, even when you think you're too old to do that ... And finally, remember this 'Yes' is always a better work than 'no'. Unless, of course, someone has just asked you to commit a felony. ~ Lisa Lutz

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

This afforded an opportunity for a close encounter with Earth as it might appear to an alien spacecraft, and Carl Sagan proposed using this as a "control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft." The instruments detected the spectral signature of the chlorophyll from green plants, and signs of an obviously life-altered atmosphere. As Sagan and colleagues wrote in their paper "A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft" published in Nature, they found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and atmospheric methane ~ David Grinspoon

The phenomenon of UFOs does exist, and it must be treated seriously. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

But the UFO phenomenon simply does not behave like extraterrestrial visitors. It actually molds itself in order to fit a given culture. ~ John Ankerberg

Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

In a movie, it's often important to have aliens whose gestures and facial expressions can be 'read' by humans. And in the days before sophisticated computer animation, most extraterrestrial bit players were guys in rubber suits. Such practical considerations forced Hollywood's hand when it came to aliens - they look like us for good reasons. ~ Seth Shostak

[A Tibetan Legend]

"There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

"You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.

"Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made.

"The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial ~ Joanna Macy

Yes, there have been ET visitations. There have been crashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. There has been a certain amount of reverse engineering that has allowed some of these craft, or some components, to be duplicated. And there is some group of people that may or may not be associated with government at this point that have this knowledge. They have been attempting to conceal this knowledge. People in high level government have very little, if any, valid information about this. It has been the subject of disinformation in order to deflect attention and create confusion so the truth doesn't come out. ~ Edgar D. Mitchell

You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species ... - with us excitedly chattering, "The Universe is created for us! We're at the center! Everything pays homage to us!" - and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots. ~ Carl Sagan

Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands - no, by now millions - of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's 99% overlap, the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. How to account for such irrational behavior? ( ... ) religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil - but why was it so much more evil than necessary - and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary? ~ Arthur C. Clarke

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

The possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel either by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations at present or ourselves in the future, is not fundamentally constrained by physical principles. ~ Harold E. Puthoff

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan

Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year. ~ Graham Hancock

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying
in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way
but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances. ~ Donald Hall

no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon - aka Yawnsville, USA - as their point of first contact. ~ Ernest Cline

Discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life: I would love it even if they were short, sullen, grumpy and sexually obsessed. But there just isn't any good evidence. ~ Carl Sagan

The center of the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Biodiversity, there's an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred million years ago. According to the plaque, "Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between earth and extraterrestrial objects," were responsible for these events. It goes on to observe: "Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

The religion of the extraterrestrial father god ruptures humanity's empathetic bond with the earth, Sophia embodied, yet it is that same religion that have given humanity in the Western world its historical and spiritual identity. ~ John Lamb Lash

Extraterrestrial contact is a real phenomenon. The Vatican is receiving much information about extraterrestrials and their contacts with humans from its Nuncios (embassies) in various countries, such as Mexico, Chile and Venezuela. ~ Corrado Balducci

If we can no longer believe in heavenly hierarchies, extraterrestrial hierarchies will suffice. ~ Brad Steiger

The total funding of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the U.S. is 0.0003 percent of the tax monies spent on health and human services. And it's not even tax money. The SETI Institute's hunt for signals is funded by donations. ~ Seth Shostak

We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. ~ Carl Sagan

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

In my official status, I cannot comment on ET contact. However, personally, I can assure you, we are not alone! ~ Charles Camarda

CSETI (The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has in the past 18 months succeeded in intentionally establishing contact with extraterrestrial spacecraft, on two occasions at very close range, and with multiple witnesses present. ~ Steven M. Greer

Spun sugar clouds and extraterrestrial crystal vintage T-birds flying through space, morning-glory girls swinging from star-hung vines in cosmic gardens. ~ Francesca Lia Block

We have no certainty we'll contact extraterrestrial beings from one of the billion earthlike planets in the sky in the next 200 years, but we have almost 100 percent certainty that we'll manufacture an alien intelligence by then. When we face these synthetic aliens, we'll encounter the same benefits and challenges that we expect from contact with ET. They will force us to reevaluate our roles, our beliefs, our goals, our identity. What are humans for? I believe our first answer will be: Humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology could not evolve. Our job is to make machines that think different - to create alien intelligences. ~ Kevin Kelly

Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, 'The 5th Wave,' explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us. ~ Rick Yancey

[ ... ] the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy. ~ Frans De Waal

Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea
if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work. ~ Philip K. Dick

It was an extraterrestrial performance. It is very special to go below 4:50, but I believe I can do better. ~ Noureddine Morceli

"I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us," Jean Giraudoux wrote in The Madwoman of Chaillot, "and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star."That poetic paranoia is a perfect description of what the Sun, as a gravitational lens, could do for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. ~ Frank Drake

An extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars ... We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of nature and the forces that sculpted this work ... and we, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, have begun to wonder about our origins ... star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth ... Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. ~ Carl Sagan

I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth. ~ Harry S. Truman

Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate. ~ Seth Shostak

Protogen is in a position to take sole possession of not only the first technology of genuinely extraterrestrial origin, but also a prefabricated mechanism for the manipulation of living systems and the first clues as to the nature of the larger - I will call it galactic - biosphere. ~ James S.A. Corey

When I was a child and told my mother I didn't felt this was my planet, she thought I was schizophrenic or autistic. When later I finished a college degree and started working in different countries, she called me monster and started threatening me. Nearly 40 years later, when I was making a living from the books I wrote based on what I know, and making 6 times more money than she ever will, she apologized. I'm just not sure why or what she was apologizing for. I had already forgiven her ignorance when realizing nobody would ever believe the truth but myself. I had to go the whole way alone. Nobody was going to come with me on this very long, painful and challenging journey that humans call life but for me was much more than that, it was my mission, of changing their whole future far beyond the time when I'm gone. She was never my mother but merely the human body that gave me birth. In that sense, I am a monster, because I had no love. I had to find that too, on my own. ~ Robin Sacredfire

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality. ~ Don DeLillo

We humans, as species, are interested in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestral intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphines, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the great whales? ~ Carl Sagan

In the Year 2000 the discovery of extraterrestrial life will create a revolution in science, art, and pornography. ~ Conan O'Brien