The Eerie Silence Quotes

“When all that is put together, my answer is that we are probably the only intelligent beings in the observable universe, and I would not be very surprised if the solar system contains the only life in the observable universe.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“if life is widespread and Earth is typical, there should have been many planets with advanced spacefaring civilizations long, long ago. So why haven’t the aliens come here already?”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“It is easy to imagine an advanced civilization sending out von Neumann probes to explore the galaxy. On arrival in a star system, one such machine would mine raw materials from asteroids or comets in order to replicate.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“rise in entropy in all physical systems and the resulting one-way slide of the universe from order to chaos, tending towards what physicists call its ‘heat death’.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“aliens would be unlikely to succumb to terrestrial germs (as they did in H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds).”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“Most obvious is that DNA may be only one of many ways that biological information is encoded, and it is hard to see how the aliens would know in advance what terrestrial life uses.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“viruses to ‘infect’ any DNA-based cells with which they come into contact. The virus inserts its message into the genetic material of the host organism’s germ cells (that’s what so-called endogenous retroviruses do), and the cell obligingly replicates it and passes the message on to all future generations”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“But creating a totally synthetic organism wouldn’t on its own prove that life is ubiquitous.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“Thinking about SETI requires us to abandon all our presuppositions about the nature of life, mind, civilization, technology and community destiny. In short, it means thinking the unthinkable.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“My conclusion is a startling one. I think it very likely—in fact inevitable—that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature, a conclusion that has obvious and far-reaching ramifications for SETI.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“Whilst this planet has been cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, forms most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“The idea that the universe has a purpose, they say, is just a hangover from religion.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“No transmission in response to a signal or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be sent until appropriate international”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“I think there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of anyone out there picking up the signals,”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“Five hundred years ago the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience,”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“energy bonanza to the paltry one billionth of the sun’s output intercepted by the Earth.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“Even if DNA is the only viable genetic molecule, there is no reason why the same amino acids in similar combinations would be used as enzymes by all life. Alien and terrestrial life forms simply wouldn’t mesh, so the aliens couldn’t eat our plants and animals.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“once an advanced extraterrestrial civilization is established, it shouldn’t endure for an extraordinary length of time—millions or tens of millions of years or more.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“Scientists still use the term ‘organic chemistry’, even though we now know that the laws of chemistry are the same whether a molecule is located inside or outside an organism.”
― Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

“A particular cellular automaton, devised by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970 and known appropriately enough as The Game of Life, has become quite fashionable, and exhibits a remarkably rich and complex ecology of shapes that move and interact.”
― Paul Charles William Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence