Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. Theyre about telling stories.

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. Theyre about telling stories.

If this is the only planet on which not only life, but intelligent life, has arisen, that would be very unusual.

The number of habitable worlds in our galaxy is certainly in the tens of billions, minimum, and we haven't even talked about the moons. And the number of galaxies we can see, other than our own, is about 100 billion.

The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the stars in their traces, was sufficiently impressed by the scale and regularity of the universe to ascribe it all to God.

The search for extra-terrestrial life is a failure until that moment when it suddenly becomes a success.

[O]ne might ask why, in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, the aliens are so intent on coming to Earth at all. It would be as if every vertebrate in North America somehow felt drawn to a particular house in Peoria, Illinois. Are we really that interesting?