Sylvia Earle Quotes

No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.

Sadly, cinemas with film as the primary source are disappearing. We need to remain open to change. That does not require one to divorce the past but to respect and process both the present and the future.

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Ever since we invented fire and the wheel, we've been demonstrating both our ability and our inherent desire to fix things that we don't like about ourselves and our environment.

Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the 'adjacent possible.' We didn't stay in the caves. We didn't stay on the planet, and soon we won't stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet.

Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

Conservation destroys the present. If we are only busy preserving the past, we are not living in the present and unable to look forward. I am against conservation. We should let young people move forward, whether we agree with them or not. We should let new things happen.

We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand, slow march of intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

While the United States of today is not the United States of yesterday there are unmistakable indications that she is also not the United States of tomorrow.

In a modern and innovative society, where advancements are plentiful and communication is instantaneous, science and technology are a part of everyday life.

The functional uses of machines and innovative computer programs is not to isolate us but, rather, to promote coexistence. If used properly, it brings us together, granting unimaginable opportunities, magnifying the most quintessential and exclusively human capabilities.

Innovations, which are the births of time.

If there's something you want to build, but the tech isn't there yet, just find the closest possible way to make it happen.

Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve.

The folks at NASA really look at the world and try to envision how things can be better.

The great thing about a reboot is, you can learn from the past if you care enough.

When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

I don't know if we're cutting out, but a friend made a really fascinating suggestion to me; that maybe I could go higher.

Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?