Quotes About Exploration

For generations, Americans have expected something new and better in their lives with every passing day—something that will make life a little more fun to live and a little more enlightening to behold. Exploration accomplishes this naturally. All we need to do is wake up to this fact.

twenty-four astronauts hail from the swing state of Ohio—more than from any other state—including John Glenn (America's first to orbit Earth) and Neil Armstrong (the world's first to walk on the Moon).

But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

For all we know, the aliens may have tried to get in touch centuries ago and have concluded that there is no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility is that aliens did become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, and drew the same conclusion.

going through a wormhole or (as we shall see) by going around a cosmic string.

There's nothing like the right telescope in the right hands of the right person at the right time for the right price.

most planets inhabited by intelligent observers are likely to be smaller than Earth

Astrophysics teaches us that we're not the center of the world.

ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

L'ignorance est l'état naturel de l'esprit pour un chercheur scientifique. Montrez-moi quelqu'un qui croit n'être en rien ignorant, et je vous montrerai quelqu'un qui n'a jamais cherché, ni affronté la frontière entre ce qui est connu et ce qui est encore inconnu dans l'univers.

What you might not have come across is the fact that Hubble is basically a photoreconnaissance satellite whose cameras point upward at the heavens rather than downward at Earth.

If the universe is anything, it should be fun.

We went to the moon, looking to discover it, and we looked back and we discovered Earth for the first time.

The Cosmic Perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave. An indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix.

At Concordia, a European science station based in Antarctica, about a dozen intrepid people spend months at a time together in perpetual darkness, farther from civilization than the International Space Station is from Earth.

That's like watching Columbus sail out of the harbor.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

By 2017, Star Wars had barely made it past the concept stage.

Every time you turn a bigger telescope to the night sky, we end up smaller than we had previously imagined…It is an ego-dismantling device

Neil: Were you strapped to a Saturn V rocket, with nine million pounds of thrust, and sent a quarter-million miles away into deep space to witness Earthrise from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve? Madalyn: No. Neil: Then shut the fuck up. In

Neil: Were you strapped to a Saturn V rocket, with nine million pounds of thrust, and sent a quarter-million miles away into deep space to witness Earthrise from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve? Madalyn: No. Neil: Then shut the fuck up.

Parts of Mars' surface is very close to the triple point of water, when it can be solid, liquid, and steam at the same time.

We explore the solar system and the rest of the cosmos with our robots, which are basically our eyes and our ears. So it's great: I get to go explore the cosmos from the comfort of my couch, which I love. I can still eat doughnuts…It's a much better life." —DR. AMY MAINZER, ASTROPHYSICIST

Had Herschel succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.