Interstellar Exploration Quotes

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.

The vast interplanetary and vast interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of space or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity.

When you leave the planet, you leave music behind.

It's our destiny to explore. It's our destiny to be a space-faring nation.

Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.

The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork.

Why should we consider defining intelligence as something global and as something that hasn't actually yet appeared on Earth? It may be useful for envisioning the future of our own civilization and any others that may be out there among the stars. It might give us something to strive for.

I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.

You don't go into space just for the science. Economically, it is not worth it. I think the reason we should be in space is for the exploration; it's the human endeavour.

We need a community of nations capable of space flight because we all have to be off this planet sometime in the future. Our sun is going to burn out eventually, and we are not in a sustainable situation.

It may take endless wars and unbearable population pressure to force-feed a technology to the point where it can cope with space. In the universe, space travel may be the normal birth pangs of an otherwise dying race. A test. Some races pass, some fail.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

A practical way to travel between the stars is a must-have for space opera, and a sine qua non for our frequently vaunted future as a galactic society.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

The factor most ignored in discussing interstellar flight is the kinetic energy that must be invested in the ship to make its tons of matter move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.

Astronomers have discovered a planet that is twice the size of earth and made of diamonds. President Obama says the planet may be inhabited by aliens not paying their fair share.

Look how far the human race has come in terms of air and space travel in the last hundred years. So in the next couple of thousand years, you've got to believe that we're going to be able to do all kinds of amazing things.

There must be other races out there, watching our tiny yellow sun glimmering in their unknown field of the sky. Do they desire us as we desire them?

But the goal isn't just scientific exploration, ... it's also about extending the range of human habitat out from Earth into the solar system as we go forward in time... In the long run a single-planet species will not survive.

The number of habitable worlds in our galaxy is certainly in the tens of billions, minimum, and we haven't even talked about the moons. And the number of galaxies we can see, other than our own, is about 100 billion.

I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.

I really like the United State, its relationship to space and time, its interest in mobility, its cosmopolitanism.

Human uploads have such a natural advantage over present-day people in the environment of space, it's exceedingly unlikely flesh-and-blood beings will ever engage in interstellar travel.

After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.