Quotes About Exploration

We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormous.

and Range, p.187. 10 seamounts that he called

What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.

So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete." In

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know.

it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

It seemed such an extraordinary notion—that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!

that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.

Then, having nothing better to do, I leafed through the index and amused myself, in a very low-key way, by looking for ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

McDonald Observatory in Texas

Traveling is more fun—hell, life is more fun—if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

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

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. "No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story

I think both sides have done a bit of a disservice to science by insisting that it must be one thing or the other. Things are likely to turn out to be not so straightforward as either camp would have you believe.

Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution.

Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments13 he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast at close range; he nearly blinded himself in the process.

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At

That was the golden age of moss collecting.

A typical submersible costs about $25,000 a day to operate, so they are hardly dropped into the water on a whim, still less put to sea in the hope that they will randomly stumble on something of interest. It's rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark.

the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study "the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes." This wasn't a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In