cosmic distances Quotes

I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the earth.

We've sent a man to the moon and that's 29,000 miles away. The center of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week but for some reason nobody's ever done it.

Galactic plankton is undoubtedly out there, but it's statistically highly likely there's also another intelligent civilisation out there somewhere. Unfortunately, the distances and time differences are so great, communication might remain impossible.

The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

Even light, which travels so fast it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.

Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.

The universe is a big place. If I was lost up there, how would you ever find me

With our present knowledge, we can respond to the challenge of stellar space flight solely with intellectual concepts and purely hypothetical analysis. Hardware solutions are still entirely beyond our reach and far, far away.

In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.

I remember at the age of six regaling my poor little sister with stories about the planets, and how far away they were and which ones might have life.