Quotes about Exploration

There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about?

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years.

Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.