Five Billion Years of Solitude Quotes

“I have lost tolerance for things without meaning. There is no time for them. Does that make sense? - Sara Seager”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“Astronomers aren’t the only people interested in large space telescopes,” Mountain told me later in his office. “We’ve been talking about NASA, but there is another, much more well-funded government agency which tends to look down rather than up.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“People don’t support what they think is best for all of science, they support what directly benefits them.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“A surface deviation of less than the diameter of a single silicon atom anywhere in the telescope’s reflective surfaces would send imperfect wavefronts cascading down the optical train,”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“If you look at the nearest thousand and come up empty, then for all practical purposes we’re probably alone. To have any rational chance of an answer, you should really look at hundreds of stars, and the physics of doing that thrusts you into this realm of 8-meter, 16-meter telescopes.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“In nearly every aspect, the shuttle program was a ruinous white elephant that failed to deliver on its most crucial promises.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“For a time, the shuttles and the ISS collectively consumed nearly half of NASA’s total budget, all while offering only the slimmest fraction of scientific returns in comparison to drastically less expensive robotic exploration.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“frustratingly vague and tautological: the Gaia hypothesis suggested that for a planet to be habitable, it must first be inhabited.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“How to Find a Habitable Planet, which was published in 2010 by Princeton University Press.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“It did not stand to reason, Lucretius wrote, that “this was the only world and heavens created, and that beyond it those many bodies of matter do nothing at all.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“The real story here is the amazing plausibility of detecting them at all, the fact that from our perch upon this speck of dust, we have come to the point where we are on the threshold of these sorts of discoveries.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“Ten, twenty years from now, just finding an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star probably won’t be a big deal, either. Historians may look back and shake their heads at this period, when astronomers were regularly claiming to have found the ‘first habitable planet,”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“if humans themselves weren’t destined to inherit the Earth, they would certainly author whatever ultimately would.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“it seemed possible that, given a few centuries’ time, we might not even recognize whatever our descendants had become.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“This book’s title, Five Billion Years of Solitude, refers to the longevity of life on Earth.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

“We took turns gazing at Venus's imperceptibly creeping black circle & clusters of nearby sunspots. Few words were said. The silence deepened with the acceptance that each gaze brought the experience closer to an end, & that in all our lives we would never see such a sight again.”
― Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars