Lenny Bruce Quotes

It's feasible that we'll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them. We don't now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learning fast how to get somewhere few think possible.

Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet.... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did? Let us not despair or mutiny.

But space travel can't ease the pressure on a planet grown too crowded not even with today's ships and probably not with any future ships-because stupid people won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even when it starts to smoke and rumble. What space travel does do is drain off the best brains: those smart enough to see a catastrophe before it happens, and with the guts to pay the price-abandon home, wealth, friends, relatives, everything-and go. That's a tiny fraction of one percent. But that's enough.

We're not sane enough yet to enter space until we learn to live together in peace on Earth.

When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere.

I left Earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.

Man must rise above the Earth -- to the top of the atmosphere and beyond -- for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives

If space is not profitable for business, there will be very few people in space.

When any country overlaid by a multitude which live upon it, there is a natural necessity to disburden itself and lay the load upon others.

Man will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.

The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices

There are many in the field of cosmology, who believe as I do, that finding ways to travel great distances will be essential to keeping human kind alive in an aging universe.

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 used to be a strong believer that we would eventually colonize the solar system the way it's been done in science fiction many, many times: bases on the moon, Mars colonized, move out to the outer planets, then we go to the next solar system and build a colony there. I don't know now - I'm not as convinced that's the way it's going to pan out.

Astronautics, strictly speaking, will be concerned with voyages to other stars. Remarkably enough, to achieve such feats, we might not even have to leave the earth. It would suffice to accelerate the sun itself to a very high speed and let it drag all its planets with it.

When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people - for a long time, anyway - are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.

We have one planet in our solar system that's habitable, and that's the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

I'd love to go into space again if there were a mission to Mars. I'd also love to go to a completely different planetary system, out of our solar system.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn't work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.

Further ahead, I'd like to see tiny spacebots - smaller than your cell phone - travel outside our solar system to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. By keeping the mass of those spacebots low, we could more easily accelerate them.

Everyone gets very excited about the idea of space travel, but... it's not going to be everybody that gets to go.

Exploration of closer planets will continue. Only after he exhausts all the resources here on earth will man go further ahead, which is when interplanetary travel may take place.

Obviously I'd like NASA to follow their charter - the exploration of our solar system and beyond. I'd like to see people someday go to Mars.

Planet colonization is not a short term concern of mine. The physical limitations of space travel render it low on the list for me.