21 Quotes by Jill Tarter

The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity's place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales.

In the future, will our technologies help stabilise or planet and population, leading to a very long lifetime for us? Or will we destroy our world and its inhabitants, after only a brief appearance on the cosmic stage?

We don't know how to identify intelligence over interstellar distances, so what we do instead is use technology for a proxy,

Ultimately, we actually all belong to only one tribe, to Earthlings.

Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans. Whether we're born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.

SETI is a mirror, a mirror that can show ourselves from an extraordinary perspective and can help to trivialize the differences among us.

The story of humans is the story of ideas that shine light into dark corners.

The space that we're looking through is nine-dimensional. If you build a mathematical model, the amount of searching that we've done in 50 years is equivalent to scooping one 8-ounce glass out of the Earth's ocean, looking and seeing if you caught a fish. No, no fish in that glass? Well, I don't think you're going to conclude that there are no fish in the ocean. You just haven't searched very well yet. That's where we are.

The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity’s place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales.