Debra Fischer

“Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.”

“Our field is very focused on finding Earth 2.0, and anything we can do to narrow the search is helpful.”

“Within the scientific community, there is healthy skepticism. And the question is, 'How do you ever get to a meaningful null result? How long and how hard do SETI scientists have to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and find nothing before they say, 'There is nothing. We are alone.'”

“The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.”

“Prebiotic chemistry on other worlds is going to be common. Plenty of small rocky planets will have similar chemistry. It's almost a given.”

“The gas-giant planets in our solar system all have large moons.”

“If few worlds have microbial life, it dramatically reduces the chances that more complex organisms exist.”

“Computers can't find the unexpected, but people can when they eyeball the data.”

“We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals.”

“Science requires speculation, creativity, and wild ideas.”

“Diamond planets truly are the most precious.”

“As our sensitivity improves, we are finally seeing planets with longer orbital periods, planetary systems that look more like our solar system.”

“Once we see stars with three times the metal content of our sun, the planet detection rate goes up to 20 per cent.”

“Kepler's blown the lid off everything we know about extra-solar planets.”

“Naturally, we think that finding another Earth-like planet is identifying a site that's at least friendly here for the evolution of life. The primary goal of the Kepler mission is to statistically assess the occurrence of these small terrestrial worlds.”

“There may be hundreds of small seed planets - or planetesimals - which grow in the disk of matter around a star.”

“When stars form a planet, they come in a bunch.”

“There's no doubt that the search for planets is motivated by the search for life. Humans are interested in whether or not life evolves on other planets. We'd especially like to find communicating, technological life, and we look around our own solar system, and we see that of all the planets, there's only one that's inhabited.”

“Ultimately, what we're looking for in the long run is to find other Earth-like planets.”

“I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.”