Interstellar Quotes

It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time. ~ Kip Thorne

There are many unidentified bands in the spectra of stars. Wide bands are produced by some complex molecules in the interstellar space. ~ Garik Israelian

Time endorses the complexities of a zeigarnik mind! ~ Vishwanath S J

mankind was born on earth but was never meant to die here ~ Christopher Nolan

I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences and at the same time emphasizing the similarities of all the intelligent races in the galaxy - tying them together, building common traditions ... The notion strikes me as kind of fine. ~ Roger Zelazny

The Cat
The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die wees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space. ~ Alastair Reynolds

The Romans have provided a lot of writers with a model for various interstellar empires, of course, and no wonder. The Roman Empire is a really good example of a large empire that, in one form or another, functioned for quite a long time over a very large area. And over all that time, there was all sorts of exciting drama – civil wars and assassinations and revolts and bits breaking off and being forced back in ... But I didn't want my future – however fanciful it was – to be entirely European. The Radchaai aren't meant to be Romans in Space. ~ Ann Leckie

Other species have interstellar travel," Jyn protested. "That didn't just come from humans. The humans never would have figured it out if not for - " Burta ~ Beth Revis

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all - raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire. ~ Peter Watts

Any beings advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances are at least a thousand years beyond our technical level. Spending gobs of time examining our missiles is equivalent to sending the Air Force back to the Middle Ages and insisting they examine the chain mail factories. ~ Seth Shostak

I have a problem,' said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. 'I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers' collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?' 'Yes, of course.' 'Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists? ~ Adam Roberts

Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade. ~ K. Hari Kumar

No civilization can possibly survive to an interstellar spacefaring phase unless it limits its numbers.
Any society with a marked population explosion will be forced to devote all its energies and technological skills to feeding and caring for the population on its home planet. This is a very powerful conclusion and is in no way based on the idiosyncrasies of a particular civilization. On any planet, no matter what its biology or social system, an exponential increase in population will swallow every resource. Conversely, any civilization that engages in serious interstellar exploration and colonization must have exercised zero population growth or something very close to it for many generations. ~ Carl Sagan

Put simply, 'Interstellar' has a strong undercurrent of cheesiness. ~ Annalee Newitz

To awaken quite alone in a strange parallel universe is the priceless moment to a time traveler! ~ Vishwanath S J

The general public long ago stopped looking for beauty in high culture. But it still has TV and the movies....you are far more likely to find genuinely mesmerising images and real beauty in big-budget Hollywood movies -- think of, say, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar or his Dark Knight Trilogy -- than in any European art-house ~ Sohrab Ahmari

A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence ... It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages. ~ Carl Sagan

Four thousand A.U. plus is a long trip-and that's as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires, because of course there aren't a lot of crows in near-interstellar space. ~ Frederik Pohl

Interstellar travel is like a flight to Australia on acid. ~ Stewart Stafford

Our knowledge of stars and interstellar matter must be based primarily on the electromagnetic radiation which reaches us. Nature has thoughtfully provided us with a universe in which radiant energy of almost all wave lengths travels in straight lines over enormous distances with usually rather negligible absorption. ~ Lyman Spitzer

Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them." "Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. "Yeah," said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises. ~ Douglas Adams

A brave new future had been charted, and none of them knew where it was going to lead.

From my upcoming novel,Frontiers, the sequel to Cybersp@ce and the second in the trilogy. ~ Jeff W. Horton

Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Universe is expanding to infinity without a center in space. How come humans claim a direction to their life? ~ Vishwanath S J

You don't buy into huge car chases or sensates or interstellar warfare, but you can buy into a loving relationship or a father-son relationship, and you can buy into the small humor. If you want to make your fiction universal, go small. That's the best way to do it. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

all of my bases covered. You assume responsibility for violations of local, regional, global, intrasystem, interstellar, intergalactic and interdimensional law, civil, religious, or military. I'm also not responsible for loss of life and limb, property damage, domestic disputes, engineered biological human dieback, nuclear fallout, violations of causality, cascading sub-quantum misalignment, hastening of cosmic heat death, rampant AI, accelerated climate change, geomagnetic reversal, vacuum metastability events, total existence failure, gray goo scenario, red goo scenario--that's a nasty one--tectonic inversion-- ~ Joseph R. Lallo

All interstellar empires rose and fell, ultimately, on their ability to deliver on this one simple, unexciting thing: logistics. ~ John Jackson Miller

One doesn't just wander unvetted into someone else's epic interstellar future history. ~ Edward M. Lerner

Don't waste your time on beaming people up or down. Instead, consider gravity waves as advanced physics of the universe that could be used to travel interstellar distances. ~ Buzz Aldrin

God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing interstellar Xbox. Isn't that funny? ~ Stephen King

The bathroom door opened and Griff emerged in a cloud of steam, the grand entrance of every B-movie alien I'd ever seen. Maybe this wasn't Griff at all but some interstellar prankster setting me up. Forget about abductions, anal probes and secret alien cookbooks - the real fun was in poking at the Earthlings' old heartaches. ~ Ben Monopoli

Astronomers suspect that the Oort Cloud could extend as far as three light-years from our solar system. That is more than halfway to the nearest stars, the Centauri triple star system, which is slightly more than four light-years from Earth. If we assume that the Centauri star system is also surrounded by a sphere of comets, then there might be a continuous trail of comets connecting it to Earth. It may be possible to establish a series of refueling stations, outposts, and relay locations on a grand interstellar highway. Instead of leaping to the next star in one jump, we might cultivate the more modest goal of "comet hopping" to the Centauri system. This thoroughfare could become a cosmic Route 66. ~ Michio Kaku

If interstellar travel is as time- or energy- demanding as the above figures indicate, it is far from obvious what the motive for colonization might be. ~ Barney Oliver

The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub-meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around ~ Douglas Adams

[...] but they and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems; a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other's fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other's pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them. ~ Evelyn Waugh

A creative design to everything demands a Time Keeper to exist. It was born out from the womb of primordial time! ~ Vishwanath S J

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. ~ Frank Tipler

We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt. - Cooper, Interstellar ~ Christopher Nolan

Watching 'Interstellar' is really like watching two movies slowly collide with each other. ~ Annalee Newitz

No experiment can distinguish between phenomena manifested by visiting interstellar (arbitrarily advanced) ETI and intelligent beings that may exist near Earth within a parallel universe or in different dimensions, or who are (terrestrial) time travelers. ~ Cris Putnam

There's been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. I don't think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we've stayed behind.

I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says "understand and respect the universe"… but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to "conquer" Earth, to steal their "precious" physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of "competition"… as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. "Conquering the galaxy" is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices ~ Greg Egan

you have to leave something behind to go forward
-Newton's Third Law of Motion ~ Greg Keyes

We don't know how to identify intelligence over interstellar distances, so what we do instead is use technology for a proxy. ~ Jill Tarter

After you kids came along, your mom, she said something to me I never quite understood. She said, "Now, we're just here to be memories for our kids." I think now I understand what she meant. Once you're a parent, you're the ghost of your children's future. ~ Cooper

The family that eats together maintains a successful interstellar criminal organization together! ~ Amie Kaufman

What I love about 'Mockingjay, Part 1' is that President Coin or Cressida could have easily been played by a man, and if you look at 'Interstellar,' the Anne Hathaway or Jessica Chastain roles would have been men years ago. ~ Natalie Dormer

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. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

Yes, a busy space, the interstellar medium. Empty space, near vacuum: and yet still, not vacuum itself, not pure vacuum. There are forces and atoms, fields, and the ever-foaming quantum surf, in which entangled quarklike particles appear and disappear, passing in and out of the ten suspected dimensions. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos. ~ Tadeusz Konwicki

agrarian societies don't repel interstellar invaders. ~ S.H. Jucha

She grinned. "Don't you want to build a huge interstellar spaceship, load it full of videogames, junk food, and comfy couches, and then get the hell out of here?" "I'm up for that, too," I said. "if it means I get to spend the rest of my life with you. ~ Ernest Cline

in an interstellar burst, i'm back to save the universe ~ Radiohead

Good bras are expensive, and you have to wash them extra carefully or you quickly find yourself buying another expensive bra. Don't get me started on the whole underwire thing. Humanity is a race capable of interstellar travel, and nobody's invented a bra for girls my size that doesn't feel like prison. Here is a truth universally acknowledged - taking that thing off at the end of the day is the single greatest feeling in the world. ~ Amie Kaufman

Time has witnessed events even before it's own birth without energy. ~ Vishwanath S J

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we've ever known - an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
"In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the "heavenly breezes" Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die - in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless ~ Maria Popova

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. ~ Douglas Adams

In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe In a fast German car I'm amazed that I survived An airbag saved my life ~ Thom Yorke

When you're doing a film called 'Interstellar,' at some point - the idea was to be grounded in the science as much as possible - but with a name like 'Interstellar,' you had better go somewhere big and bold. ~ Jonathan Nolan

In order to understand the phenomena in a certain plasma region, it is necessary to map not only the magnetic but also the electric field and the electric currents. Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure. ~ Hannes Alfven

The advanced interstellar culture operates on a barter system. Never saw that one coming. ~ John Sandford

Take a closer look at the word "Change". You never "Changed", instead, you were 'Manipulated' by illusion. ~ Vishwanath S J

Dear Sirs," Flick began before loudly inhaling, "On account of there being no heat down here in account of the being no electricity on account of the brand-new energy rations so thoughtfully and nobly and honorably imposed on the steerage decks by Sovereign Nicolaeus on account of the blackouts - Aster fell prey to a brief fit of hypothermia-induced delirium de spoke against you in her maddery. She's healed up now so you don't have to worry about it happening again. ~ Rivers Solomon

Time throws you out of its dimensionless planar like a boomerang. It unites with you again in death. ~ Vishwanath S J

Airbag

In the next world war
in a jack knifed juggernaut,
I am born again.

In the neon sign,
scrolling up and down,
I am born again.

In an interstellar burst,
I am back to save the universe.

In a deep deep sleep,
of the innocent,
I am born again.

In a fast German car,
I'm amazed that I survived,
an airbag saved my life.

In an interstellar burst,
I am back to save the universe.

In an interstellar burst,
I am back to save the universe.

In an interstellar burst,
I am back to save the universe. ~ Radiohead

What kind of hard SF do I write? Everything from near-future, Earth-centric techno-thrillers to far-future, far-flung interstellar epics. ~ Edward M. Lerner

Let me tell you, there's no long-distance relationship like an interstellar one. ~ Karen Lord

I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you. ~ Woody Allen

Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it. ~ Larry Niven

You can work through the physics of interstellar radio attenuation,1 but the problem is captured pretty well by considering the economics of the situation: If your TV signals are getting to another star, you're wasting money. Powering a transmitter is expensive, and creatures on other stars aren't buying the products in the TV commercials that pay your power bill. The full picture is more complicated, but the bottom ~ Randall Munroe

In 1960, for example, the Committee for Long Range Studies of the Brookings Institution prepared a report for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warning that even indirect contact - i.e., alien artifacts that might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the moon, Mars or Venus or via radio contact with an interstellar civilization - could cause severe psychological dislocations. The study cautioned that "Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior. ~ Stanley Kubrick

Time, as such doesn't travel! It's the paradox & uncertainty inside you that makes it travel. ~ Vishwanath S J

Time cannot put anything in your hands until you let go off the time. ~ Vishwanath S J

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. ~ Barney Oliver

[ ... ]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked
insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words
Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most
remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in. ~ Douglas Adams

The possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel either by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations at present or ourselves in the future, is not fundamentally constrained by physical principles. ~ Harold E. Puthoff

There are problems humans cannot solve, to wit: density dependent birth rates, loss of genetic diversity, the overturning of his population pyramid, traveling to the nearest star, and the extinction of Man. ~ Bill Gaede

Blue Planet Phenomenon.

she's from the pink planet called Constellation
he's from the dark planet beyond
under a constant monitor
no love a interplanetary phenomenon

he's an interstellar
she's studying astronomy
what they have seen sets in motion their biology
they will meet on the blue planet
they should know better
it's death if they get together

interplanetary love is forbidden
their passion keep it hidden
they should know better
but they must be together
to the blue planet
love velocity interstellar

crossing Earth's longitudes
hiding their love in the new years eve multitudes
they should know better
their love still not allowed
under another planets blanketing cloud

Planet Earth in unified love
new years eve blue planet phenomenon
she will fall pregnant
their baby conceived at a time of human unity
their unborn baby and united humanity
become one in harmony

interstellar before they're discovered
too late their love uncovered
they should know better
it's death for forbidden love together

trial on dark planet
they will all die today
"kill them now"
judgment say

they plea for their unborn baby's mercy
a reprieve
child leniency
only for their baby clemency

"bring on the birth" authoritie ~ R.M. Romarney

Some segments of this book may be rough going. That's the nature of real science. It requires thought. Sometimes deep thought. But thinking can be rewarding. You can just skip the rough parts, or you can struggle to understand. ~ Kip S. Thorne

You know we're in a planet surrounded by certain kinds of frequencies and noise. The earth's magnetic sphere makes weird sounds. The sun you know the heart of our solar system makes noise. Even interstellar phenomena like black holes. You know people have studied them and a black hole can emit sound in like the range of 20,000 octaves below B flat. ~ DJ Spooky

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another ... ~ Diane Duane

I can't be your ghost right now. I need to exist ~ Jonathan Nolan

We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us. ~ Cooper - Interstellar

Time is an encoded pattern of fabric woven with information & energy. ~ Vishwanath S J

Any life-form advanced enough to travel light-years through interstellar space would have nothing to learn by probing the rectums of farmers in Kansas. ~ Dan Brown

Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful in our time than in the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the sources of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space ~ Bertrand Russell

Time is a creation of vague mind used to describe an unknown dimension in the 3D world. ~ Vishwanath S J

Statistically it's a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligences, life forms out there. I believe they're so advanced they're even doing interstellar travel. I believe it's possible they even came here. ~ Story Musgrave

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion.
... I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

Billions of years ago exploding stars sent atoms hurtling through space and we've been recycling them on Earth ever since. Except for the occasional comet, meteor, some interstellar dust, we've used exactly the same atoms over and over since the earth was formed. We eat them, we drink them, we breathe them, we are made of them. At this precise moment each of us is exchanging our atoms with everyone else, and not just with each other, but with other animals, trees, fungi, moulds... ~ Nathan Filer

'Interstellar' is a thematic sequel to Christopher Nolan's last original film, 'Inception'. It drops us into a dark future full of otherworldly landscapes and time distortions. ~ Annalee Newitz

One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. ~ Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

We on earth do not feel either the gravitational field of the sun or the centrifugal force caused by the earth's motion around the sun because the two forces balance each other, but this balance would be spoiled if one force was proportional to the mass of the objects on which it acts and the other was not; some objects might then fall off the earth into the sun and others could be thrown off the earth into interstellar space. ~ Steven Weinberg

Space doesn't offer an escape from Earth's problems. And even with nuclear fuel, the transit time to nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel is therefore, in my view, an enterprise for post-humans, evolved from our species not via natural selection, but by design. ~ Martin Rees

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands. ~ Stanisław Lem

It is a truism that the structure of a society is basically determined by its technology. Not in an absolute sense-there may be totally different cultures using identical tools-but the tools settle the possibilities; you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to a single planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with its basic machines of industry and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room. ~ Poul Anderson

The energy requirements for interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades. If they want to make contact, they would make contact; if not, they would save their energy and go elsewhere. ~ Isaac Asimov

If you can successfully embrace the Anti-Matter version of yourself, Time would cease to exist for You. You are God! ~ Vishwanath S J