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Once typecast as the indispensable altarpiece of a well-appointed living room, TVs have infected every human environment. The average American household has more television sets than people.

From Seth Shostak

There will be an end point to how good TV pictures can get. The boob tube has hugely benefited from the rapid advance of digital electronics. Consequently, the strategy for hardware has changed. In the old days, sets had to be as simple as Elmer Fudd to keep them inexpensive. All the technical 'smarts' were at the transmitter end.

From Seth Shostak

The longtime standard for American TV was 525 lines from top to bottom of the image. As a practical matter, that was roughly equivalent to 350 thousand pixels - pretty crude, given that photos made with your iPhone boast five million pixels.

From Seth Shostak

Engineers are now experimenting with 4,096-line TV systems, suggesting that with the next generation of sets you'll be able to count the grass blades on the Superbowl field, an obvious lifestyle improvement.

From Seth Shostak

Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.

From Seth Shostak

Heads are a good deal, and I think they would be a common feature. It's hard to think of species that don't have heads, although there are some. It's good to have a head because it puts some of the sensory organs - eyes, ears, whiskers or whatever - next to the CPU, the brain.

From Seth Shostak

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

From Seth Shostak

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!'

From Seth Shostak

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

From Seth Shostak

Just knowing that there's somebody else out there - that what's happened on this planet has also happened in many other places - that might change our lives in a very subtle way, but it's interesting to know and worth looking for.

From Seth Shostak

Seth Shostak

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