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Space is big. You just won't believe how
vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a
long way down to the drugstore, but that's just peanuts to space.
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-Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy
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In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a
bad move.
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-Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe
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Looking at the stars always makes me dream,
as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on
a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as
accessible as the lack dots on the map of France?
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-Vincent van Gogh
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The universe is not hostile, nor yet it is
friendly. It is simply indifferent.
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-John H. Holmes
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For NASA, space is still a high priority.
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-Dan Quayle
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[It's] time for the human race to enter the
solar system.
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-Dan Quayle
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*For all
the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an
inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that
the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This
pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was
free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious
sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of
the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy.
At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of
the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact
dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps
that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all.
For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of
the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and
emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the
human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed
and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations
grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their
ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology.
Which even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut
themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the
dawn of space exploration.
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-Carl Sagan
Contact, 1985
Part I : The Message, Chapter 2, "Coherent Light"
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*We are, in the most
profound sense, children of the Cosmos.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter IX, "The Lives of the Stars"
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*The study of the galaxies
reveals a universal order and beauty. It also shows us chaotic violence on
a scale hitherto undreamed of. That we live in a universe which permits
life is remarkable. That we live in one which destroys galaxies and stars
and worlds is also remarkable. The universe seems neither benign nor
hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter IX, "The Edge of Forever"
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*Something in us recognizes
the Cosmos as home. We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution
have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the Cosmos is
a voyage of self-discovery.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?"
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*The total amount of
energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio
telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a singly snowflake
striking the ground.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter X, "The Edge of Forever"
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*If the general picture of
an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still
more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big
Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all
matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does
that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God
created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we
wish courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where
God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a
step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.
Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude
that the universe has always existed?
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter X, "The Edge of Forever"
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The universe is one of God's thoughts.
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-Friedrich Schiller
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A black hole is where God divides by zero.
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-Unknown
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