Werner Koczwara: The Surprising Quote About Telescopes and Intelligent Life

"“But when you look at CMB map (Cosmic Microwave Background), you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun - the plane of the earth around the sun - the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe. The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is (s)imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.”" Lawrence Krauss

"In Newton’s day, the Ptolemaic system and the Keplerian version of the Copernican system were taught side by side in the universities of the world. But the pendulum of belief had swung irreversibly to the Copernican side. In the minds of most scientists, the heliocentric universe had become fact…Yet there remained a crucial missing element in what was otherwise a complete and compelling picture of the universe: Not one shred of indisputable observational proof existed that the Earth moved through space.Here then was the holy grail of many an astronomer. To prove that the Earth in fact revolved in a wide orbit around the Sun, the parallax of just one star – any star – had to be detected. The hunt for stellar parallax was on." Alan Hirshfeld