“When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of c...” — Seth Shostak Quote

When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.

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.

Any beings advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances are at least a thousand years beyond our technical level. Spending gobs of time examining our missiles is equivalent to sending the Air Force back to the Middle Ages and insisting they examine the chain mail factories.

Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered them incapable of reproducing within their own species. But do extraterrestrial infants toddle through your neighborhood?

In order to sharpen its prediction skills, our brains constantly build models, or 'templates,' of the world. The better the template, the better the performance. And now we know playing action video game actually fosters better templates.

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest.

Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.

The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.