Carl Sagan - Earth Quotes

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Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down — toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.

Carl Sagan
All my life, I've wondered about life beyond the earth. On those countless other planets that we think circle other suns, is there also life? Might the beings of other worlds resemble us, or would they be astonishingly different? What would they be made of? In the vast Milky Way galaxy, how common is what we call life? The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.

Carl Sagan
Our intelligence and our technology have given us the power to affect the climate. How will we use this power? Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.

Carl Sagan
The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

Carl Sagan
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Carl Sagan
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.

Carl Sagan
The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life.

Carl Sagan
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.

Carl Sagan
At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.

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

Carl Sagan
We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

Carl Sagan
When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life.... It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.... with trivial exceptions, all organisms on Earth use... an enzyme, to control the rate and direction of the chemistry of life.... a nucleic acid to encode the hereditary information... the identical code book for translating nucleic acid language into protein language.... At the molecular level, we are all virtually identical.

Carl Sagan
After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.

Carl Sagan
The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal

Carl Sagan
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 single snowflake striking the ground.

Carl Sagan
The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place.

Carl Sagan
Bovine flatulence — the intimate intestinal activities of cows, reindeer, elephants, and elk — is detectable over interplanetary distances, while the bulk of the activities of mankind are invisible. We would not ordinarily consider the flatulence of cattle as a dominant manifestation of life on Earth, but there it is.

Carl Sagan
Let's go back to the solar nebula... with the temperature declining the farther we get from the Sun.... at different distances from the Sun, different materials will condense out, because they have different vapor pressures or different melting points.... water condenses out roughly at the vicinity of the Earth, whereas silicates condense out closer to the Sun... you have to go out to somewhere near the present distance of Saturn before methane condenses.

Carl Sagan
When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it.

Carl Sagan
The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.

Carl Sagan
Apart from an understanding of the solar system as a whole, it is becoming clear that information about any planet or satellite illuminates our knowledge of the others. In particular, if we are to understand the Earth, we must have a comprehensive knowledge of the other planets.

Carl Sagan
A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?

Carl Sagan
These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

Carl Sagan
Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them.

Carl Sagan
As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.

Carl Sagan