Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us? Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design
In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe ... We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time. Lawrence M Krauss, A Universe from Nothing
In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
Find other lands beneath another sun. James Thomson, The Seasons, 1746
How glorious, then, appears the mind of man,
When in it all the stars, and planets, roll.
And what it seems, it is: great objects make
Great minds. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, 1742-5
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe. Jimmy Carter
The universe was an expanding structure – galaxies flying away from each other, flying away from each other ever more rapidly the further away they were. The implication of course of all this if you simply send time backwards everything is closer together in the past. So there’s the idea of something blowing up or flying apart. Professor Bob Dicke, interview BBC
So it was ironic that an early champion of an objective scientific theory of the origin of the universe was an ordained Catholic Priest. And what a strange twist that his science-based solution was to appear so religious. That the universe didn’t always exist. But there was once an ‘In the beginning’. Belgian Father George Le Maitre argued that the universe was born ... Lemaitre said the universe isn’t static but is actually expanding ... If the universe was expanding, Lemaitre reasoned, it was smaller yesterday than it is today, therefore it must have once been unimaginably small. Lemaitre believed that the universe began with what he dubbed as a primeval atom, an infinitely dense cosmic egg that had at some time in the past exploded. Beyond the Big Bang, History 2007
[Fred Hoyle devoted] his life to fighting the notion that the cosmos began at a certain point in time, with a big bang. He preferred the view Aristotle held millennia earlier: The universe has always existed, and always will. A turning point in Hoyle’s young life came at age thirteen, when his parents gave him the gift that has changed so many other young lives: a small telescope. They allowed him to stay up all night looking at the stars and planets. As fate would show, Hoyle and Gamow had more in common than the fact that each had received a telescope in his thirteenth year. Each was a father, intellectually speaking, and each exploded with far more ideas than could ever be true. After working on radar in England during the Second World War, Hoyle became an astronomy Professor at Cambridge University. He also began developing talks about astronomy on BBC radio and writing popular articles and books. Like Gamow, Hoyle was becoming a highly visible interpreter of science to lay-people. During one of his popular radio broadcasts in 1950 Hoyle coined the phrase big bang as a description of Gamow's repugnant (to Hoyle) theory. Hoyle had meant the term to be derogatory, but it was so compelling, so stirring of the imagination, that it stuck, but without the negative overtones. Hoyle became the most visible proponent of an alternative theory to big bang, known as the steady state theory. The struggle for intellectual supremacy between these two theories dominated cosmology for almost two decades. George Smoot & Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time pp67-68
It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics. Martin Rees, cited Wolpert & Richards, A Passion for Science 1988
For thousands of years we’ve wondered whether we’re alone in the universe ... All of our searching is leading to one ultimate goal: finding intelligent life somewhere in the vastness of the universe. Extreme Universe: Is Anyone Out There? National Geographic 2010
So is Earth the only planet where life has emerged in this vast cosmos? Are we alone or are we part of something bigger? A web of life that stretches light years through the universe. But for many years the question was taboo to science. ibid.
We thought all life needed access to sunlight. But working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Bob Ballard found a thriving eco-system where there was no sunlight. ibid.
Compelling reasons to colonise space are to see if we can expand the range of our activity beyond the Earth, or are we really confined to the Earth? I think that’s an important question we need to know the answer to. The second one is, what is the role of life? We have on this Earth a phenomenon called life. Is it destined to spread beyond the Earth? Chris McKay
Cosmologists are baffling over the universe’s greatest enigma: black holes. We’ve never seen them, it’s near impossible to study them, and their existence challenges everything we think we know about space. Black holes are at the very heart of cosmology yet some scientists question if they are even real. How the Universe Works s6e1: Are Black Holes Real, Discovery 2018
Cosmologists are listening for proof in the hidden world of gravitational waves. ibid.
What if black holes have hair? … These hairy black holes could solve the information paradox. ibid.
Quantum mechanics is at the heart of the problem. ibid.
There was no beginning of the universe. Past, present, future. The universe has always existed and it always will. It stays the same. Hawking 2004 starring Benedict Cumberbatch & Michael Brandon & Tom Hodgkins & Lisa Dillon & Phoebe Nicholls & Adam Godley & Peter Firth & Tom Ward & John Sessions & Matthew Marsh & Alice Eve & Rohan Siva et al, director, Fred Hoyle on the box
There’s nothing wrong with feeling in science. Feeling matters. ibid. Hawking
It’s gradual paralysis. ibid. doctor
Two years probably. No more. ibid. dad
You have to fight for what you believe in tooth and nail or the buggers will stop you. ibid. tutor to Hawking
The physics is wrong. ibid. Hawking to Hoyle