Malcolm Wallop Quotes

When you look at the number of satellites, what they're doing and what they represent, it is really a vision of trying to have the world in your clutches.

The 20th Century was the century of Aviation and the century of Globalization. The next century will be the century of Space.

During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.

Canada's a huge country, so to be able to unite the country through communication satellite technology or to be able to observe it through remote sensing technology from space is a natural fit for a country like Canada.

When my grandfather was born, there was no healthcare. There were no airplanes. There were no boats. There were no trains. There were no communications. No Internet. No widespread knowledge. It will be a completely different world but a much better place in a hundred years.

The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. So you don't have to wait for a letter to get to England in six weeks, you have almost instant communication. That was an enormous shift.

And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian.

Eighteen fifty-eight was a year of great technological advancement in the West. That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. And they were the first to 'Twitter' transatlantically.

All of us know today the value of communications satellites, weather satellites, resources satellites, etc.

What I'm trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

The Internet is this whole new world that allows everyone to communicate and exchange information and be a perfect marketplace and just accelerate everybody's lives. So, for me, the Internet was the greatest invention of mankind so far.

We all know the Internet didn't explode until it became a commercial enterprise. Space communication will probably have the same characteristic.

Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.

You have to have access to ideas. The Internet is facilitating that access to ideas. In 25 years, the way that data's going to flow back and forth, we don't quite understand yet.

Through historical accident, we've ended up with a global network that pretty much allows anybody to communicate with anyone else at any time.

There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.

Human technology has made it to Mars. We are transmitting gorgeous pictures from it. Yet we have not explored our own planet. Two-thirds of it is covered with oceans that are still mysterious places.

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.

We can no better imagine what will be happening on the moon 500 years from now than Columbus could imagine contemporary Manhattan. Except to say that it will be a place familiar to billions of people.

If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.

We live in an age of miracles.

Space exploration is important research to our economic and national defense, and America's space program is a symbol of our success as a scientifically and technologically advanced nation.

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.

It was government investment that led to the creation of the Internet.