Quotes About Planets

For long lifetimes marked by the hulks of ruined planets, man was a geological and ecological force without knowing it, with little awareness of his own strength. — PARDOT KYNES, The Long

The human body is a machine, a system of organic chemicals, fluid conduits, electrical impulses; a government is likewise a machine of interacting societies, laws, cultures, rewards and punishments, patterns of behavior. Ultimately, the universe itself is a machine, planets around suns, stars gathered into clusters, clusters and other suns forming entire galaxies.… Our job is to keep the machinery functioning.

Kepler's third or harmonic law states that the squares of the periods of the planets (the times for them to complete one orbit) are proportional to the cubes of their average distance from the Sun; the more distant the planet, the more slowly it moves, but according to a precise mathematical law: P2 = a3, where P represents the period of revolution of the planet about the Sun, measured in years, and a the distance of the planet from the Sun measured in "astronomical units.

Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing.

Of all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our Solar System, there is fire only on Earth—because there are large amounts of oxygen gas, O2, only on Earth. Fire was, much later, to have profound consequences for life and intelligence. One thing leads to another.

The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn't have been this way. We didn't impose it on the Universe. That's the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.

Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least - the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars.

As we identify the planets of other stars, as we find other words of roughly the size and mass of Earth, we will scrutinize them for life.

Nuestro planeta y nuestro sistema solar se hallan rodeados por un nuevo mundo oceánico, las profundidades del espacio. Y no es más infranqueable que el de otras épocas.

One consequence of this train of argument is that, even if civilizations commonly arise on planets throughout the Galaxy, few of them will be both long-lived and nontechnological. Since hazards from asteroids and comets must apply to inhabited planets all over the Galaxy, if there are such, intelligent beings everywhere will have to unify their home worlds politically, leave their planets, and move small nearby worlds around. Their eventual choice, as ours, is spaceflight or extinction.

Early in my studies, I was amazed and disappointed that such a view had ever been taken seriously, that for planets of other stars, absence of evidence had been considered evidence of absence.

The total number of such worlds are, as I said, something of the order of a trillion, or 10^12, a one followed by twelve zeros, of which Earth represents just one, all in the family of the Sun. And our star, of course, is one of a vast multitude.

What is magic? There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day.

From here it also looks a great deal bigger, because space is not really big, it is simply somewhere to be big in. Planets are big, but planets are meant to be big and there is nothing clever about being the right size.

People don't live on the Disc any more than, in less hand-crafted parts of the multiverse, they live on balls. Oh, planets may be the place where their body eats its tea, but they live elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit very handily around the centre of their heads

Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It's a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth's old eyes.

Meanwhile the sluggish GDP growth of recent decades in many high-income countries has infamously been accompanied by widening income inequalities. At the same time, all of these countries' global ecological footprints already far exceed Earth's capacity: it would take four planets for everyone in the world to live as they do in Sweden, Canada and the United States, and five planets for all to live like an Australian or Kuwaiti.

Everything is alive, everything is in motion, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays that emanate from me or from others flow directly through the infinite chain of creation whose transparent network is in continuous communication with the planets and the stars. A captive here on earth for the moment, I commune with the chorus of stars and they join in my sorrows and joys.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

a prerequisite for the creation of the intellectual edifice upon which your spreadsheets, air-conditioned offices and mobile phones rest was the curiosity-driven quest to understand the motions of the planets and the Earth's place amongst the stars.

Take note, politicians, economists and science policy advisors of the twenty-first century; a prerequisite for the creation of the intellectual edifice upon which your spreadsheets, air-conditioned offices and mobile phones rest was the curiosity-driven quest to understand the motions of the planets and the Earth's place amongst the stars.

There are three known planets in the PSR B1257 system, which have been named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. Poltergeist was the first to be discovered. I know, I was curious about their names as well. Poletrgeist means "pounding ghost". The draugr are the unded in Norse legends who live in their graves. And Phobetor is the personification of nightmares, and the son of Nyx, Greek goddess of the night. Astronomers are goths.

Host of heaven" was a term that referred to astronomical bodies that were also considered to be gods or members of the divine council.[8] The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that, "in many cultures the sky, the sun, the moon, and the known planets were conceived as personal gods. These gods were responsible for all or some aspects of existence. Prayers were addressed to them, offerings were made to them, and their opinions on important matters were sought through divination."[9]

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.