Trevor Paglen Quotes

But one of the coolest things about meteorites is that most were formed four-and-a-half-billion years ago, during the birth of our solar system, when, for reasons not yet known, a cloud of gas and dust was transformed into a sun with circling planets.

The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

Many people find the universe confusing - it's not.

Thanks to the fact that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, and invoking a bunch of Newtonian physics, you can deduce that our planet wobbles, too, taking roughly 26,000 years to trace out a small circle on the sky, a phenomenon known as precession.

The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station, doesn't have the luxury of disposal: discharging trash into space has long been judged a bad idea.

Our planet has a peculiar wobble - its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years.

In 'Sidney's Comet,' thanks to all the consumerism, all the garbage had to be put in deep space, even though we're not supposed to litter the cosmos - that was an environmental message. Although it was funny, it had an important message.

I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.

We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

The rockets and the satellites, spaceships that we're creating now, we're pollinating the universe.

My interest in astronomy grew from the play 'Space' that I did, where I had to learn where my character was from. I had to study the stars and figure where everything was and how I got here and all of those things.

I'd love to be an astronaut. I bet you get a better understanding of our planet seeing it from a distance.

The density of space junk peaks around 620 miles up, in the middle of so-called low-Earth orbit. That's bad, because many weather, scientific, and reconnaissance satellites circle in various low-Earth orbits.

Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.

Asteroid detection, tracking, and defense of our planet is something that NASA, its interagency partners, and the global community take very seriously.

Earth is going to lose its oceans in the future, just as Venus did in the past. How long planets retain their oceans is a function of distance from the sun, all other things being equal.

If you're sending a message to extraterrestrials, what you want to send is what's special about us and our planet - what is unusual. Now, that's not basic chemistry or mineralogy; it's pretty much the cultural stuff and the consequences of evolution.

It's quite likely that planets and solar systems like ours could be forming in other galaxies in great numbers.

I don't know why. I'm fascinated with stars and space. I just love them.

I've always been in love with the stars and view the cosmos as the ultimate adventure.

Evidence has been mounting for the key role that black holes play in the process of galaxy formation. But it now appears that they are likely the prima donnas of this space opera.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we're the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.