15 quotes
Since, in the long run, every planetary society 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.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgement to have safely traveled from star to star.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"?
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g — what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma — to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)