Edgar Mitchell Quotes

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

All over the world, we're seeing access to food, clean water, education and healthcare improve; as a result, global innovation is rising as well.

By going to Mars one day, we will make things better for us here on Earth.

Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience.

The children of today are the builders of a brave, new world - a world without want.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

People need to be made conscious of a very simple reality: we have no choice but to share this planet, this small blue sphere floating in the vast reaches of space, with all of our fellow 'passengers.'

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.

The International Space Station is a phenomenal laboratory, an unparalleled test bed for new invention and discovery. Yet I often thought, while silently gazing out the window at Earth, that the actual legacy of humanity's attempts to step into space will be a better understanding of our current planet and how to take care of it.

I think we have a good chance of surviving long enough to colonize the solar system.

If we are to have faith that mankind will survive and thrive on the face of the earth, we must believe that each succeeding generation will be wiser than its progenitors.

Mars, we know, was once wet and warm. Was it home to life? And what can living and learning to work on its rust-colored surface teach us about the future of our own planet, Earth? Answering those mysteries may hold the key to our future.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

More goods and fewer people" is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future.

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.

Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books, we shall not exist.

Through writing, Homo sapiens then became the first species to preserve learning, enabling knowledge to grow, ultimately at an exponential pace. Collective learning over time then became the source of technological improvement, a process that could move much faster than evolution.

Why would you need to expand beyond the solar system if you already have access to all the information you need, and you've essentially insulated yourself against a planetary apocalypse? Maybe that's enough.

I'd argue that in the last few decades in America, when people are asked what they hope the future will look like, they still turn to 'Star Trek.' They hope we put aside our differences and come together as humanity, that we rise above war, poverty, racism, and other problems that have beset us.

We need to make sure that the Voyager probes carrying a record of human civilization speeding beyond our solar system remain an introduction to the world that sent them and not an epitaph for a civilization that caused its own ruin.