Mary Roach Quotes

People should decide 'are you willing to spend all this money to go to Mars?' I think the average person on the ground would never spend that amount of money - they have to spend it on something that makes sense and this is definitely saving our planet.

Major actions by courageous and wise men will be necessary to avoid our continuing to blunder into the space age like unenlightened and selfish idiots.

If we go back to the moon, we're guaranteed second, maybe third place because while we are spending all that money, Russia has its eye on Mars. Landing people on the moon will be terribly consuming of resources we don't have. It sounds great - 'Let's go back. This time we're going to stay.' I don't know why you would want to stay on the moon.

It's more fun having him as everyman in the 25th Century. It is better to concentrate on what this planet will be like 500 years from now, and not be dealing with little aliens in space and all that related stuff.

We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization.

Some people argue we should solve all the problems on Earth before going off the planet, but that's like telling Lewis and Clark to stay put until the rest of the East was settled. No way.

Priorities have to be allocated by the government because they have a complete picture of the country's requirements. If priority is allocated to a manned space programme, I'm confident we can swing it. But it's going to be tremendously expensive - the infrastructure and so on.

With so much conflict in the world, space exploration can be a beacon of hope.

Too many people view on [space exploration] as a luxury rather than as a fundamental driver to stimulate interest in science to everyone in the educational pipeline. It's vital to our prosperity and security.

I don’t think I’d set money above public health. I place them all at the highest ranking.

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

Nobody yet knows how to improve working conditions and environmental quality without imposing heavy costs somewhere.

You can’t reform education without spending some money.

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

I can get billions of dollars with comparative ease, but when I get down to the practical proposition about personnel … all of those billions are futile unless you provide the highly trained personnel.

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Since the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” humans have done extraordinary things. We stabilized the stratospheric ozone layer; we connected people in instantaneous and previously unimaginable ways; we landed a golf cart on Mars and drove it around. We even got every nation-state on earth (except ours, apparently) to agree to try to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by midcentury.

We have brought down emissions in this country through our legal system and through technological innovation. We can do this on our own. We don't have to have the permission of countries all over the world to do that.

Something must be done to save humanity! A better world is possible!

Just like some day, say, 1000 years from now, when we can go to another star and see a planet, that's what we would do because we will know how to cure cancer, cure birth defects, so we would teach them.

The world has not yet reached the point which, in my view, is an essential condition for the survival of our human species: access by all the peoples to the material resources of this planet.

Mars would seem, to me, to be the best place to focus our collective effort as a species... I think people would like to experience something sort of hopeful in terms of where we go next... as a species.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we'll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.