Quotes About Universe

in the words of Carl Sagan.

coloured temperature image of the first photons ever created, representing the most ancient light in the universe, which are detectable on Earth as a faint, steady background noise or—more familiarly to most of us—as part of the static on TV pictures.

This is one reason why some experts believe that there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one that we could exist in.

The universe was vaster—vastly vaster—than anyone had ever supposed.

It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other. This isn't a matter of simply needing more precise instruments; it is an immutable property of the universe.

Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small two-inch telescope it leaps to 300,000.

what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.

Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.

The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with.

Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by "we" I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.

We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand. And

appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky's "dark matter"—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.

It appears that the universe may not only be filled with dark matter, but with dark energy.

Alpha Centauri

The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what is in our own solar system. Now

when we peer into the distance some of the galaxies we see may simply be reflections, ghost images created by rebounded light.

we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because

Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.

Wenn wir ein Lebewesen damit beauftragen wollten, sich in der Einsamkeit des Kosmos um Lebendiges zu kümmern, zu überwachen, was daraus wird und wohin es geht, sollte man für diese Aufgabe keine Menschen auswählen.