Planetary Context Quotes

While we're having all these debates about how the book is being destroyed by the Kindle, we have to remember that narrative will not be affected at all because it's part of our makeup as a creature on this planet.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.

It's tiny out there...it's inconsequential. It's ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets.

Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

I do believe very strongly that all of us and all of the other things in the context of our planet with Mother Nature, all of these things absolutely have a profound effect.

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.

You'd chosen to be an upright biped on the surface of a small planet of a minor sun on the edge of a minor galaxy of one of the multiple trillions of universes. That's OK. It doesn't matter what form you take.

The observations that have developed over the years have given us perspective about where we fit in. We are newcomers, really recent arrivals on a planet that is four and a half billion years old.