Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 1983 - David Icke - William Shakespeare - Samuel Beckett - George Carlin - Stephen Hawking - E B White - Michael Mosley TV - Lyndon B Johnson - Henry David Thoreau - James Pinkerton - Decoding the Past TV - Carl Sagan - Lucius Seneca - Craig DeForest - Death of the Sun TV - Brian Cox TV - Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole TV - Maggie Aderin-Pocock TV - F Scott Fitzgerald - Earth Without the Moon TV - NASA: Triumph and Tragedy TV - Horizon TV - James Briden - John Milton - Percy Bysshe Shelley - John Muir - Jane Goodall - Crazy Horse - Chief Seattle - W E Aytoun - William Wordsworth - David Attenborough TV - Robert Britt - Peter Schultz - Ken Nealson - James Lawless - Eric Hoffer - Mahatma Gandhi - Rachel Carson - Friedrich Nietzsche - Kurt Vonnegut - Christopher Hitchens - W Somerset Maugham - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Jack Kerouac - Heath Byers - Charles Lyell - Jonathan Anthony Burkett - Joseph Guth - C S Lewis - George Bernard Shaw - George Orwell - Neil deGrasse Tyson - John Paul Getty - Gore Vidal - Virgil - Alfred Lord Tennyson - Clarence Darrow - Thomas Hardy - Extreme Universe TV - The Day the Earth was Born TV - Jim Morrison - The Universe TV - Lee Kump - Mike Benton - Kei Hirose - How the Universe Works TV - Richard Hammond’s Journey to the Centre of the Planet TV - Tony Robinson TV - Iain Stewart TV - Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey TV - Mankind: The Story of All of Us TV - Supersized Earth TV - Jacob Bronowski -
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s revolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour. It’s orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it’s reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour in a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light years thick. And out by us it’s just three thousand light years wide. We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go round every two hundred million years. And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe. The universe itself keeps expanding and expanding in all the directions it can whiz. As fast as it can go the speed of light you know twelve million miles a minutes and that’s the fastest speed there is. So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure how amazing and unlikely is your birth. And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space. ’Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life starring Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin & Carol Cleveland & Simon Jones & Patricia Quinn & Judy Loe et al, director Terry Jones, song & dance routine, 1983
The planet itself is a living, thinking, emotional entity, and we are interacting with that energy field. David Icke, cited Chris White, ‘David Icke Debunked’
Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell ...
What comfortable hour canst thou name
That ever graced me in thy company? William Shakespeare, Richard III IV iv 167 & 174-175, Duchess of York to King Richard
O, why should nature build so foul a den,
Unless the gods delight in tragedies? William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus iV i 58-59, Marcus
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. William Shakespeare, Hamlet I v 167-168, Hamlet to Horatio
It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, the brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. ibid. II ii @316, Hamlet
The earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. ibid. II ii 390-391
That’s how it is on this bitch of an Earth. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot starring Stephen Brennan & Barry McGovern & Johnny Murphy & Sam McGovern et al, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Pozzo, 2001
You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that. Samuel Beckett
That’s what got us in trouble in the first place – interfering with Nature. Meddling. Doesn’t anybody understand that? … Stop interfering. Leave Nature alone: haven’t we done enough damage? … And the supreme arrogance – Save the Planet. Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves. We haven’t learned to care for one another – we’re gonna save the fucking planet? George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty
By the way, there’s nothing wrong with the planet in the first place – the planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doing great; it’s been there over four billion years … Believe me, the planet has put up with much worse than us … The planet isn’t going anywhere, folks. We are. We’re going away. Pack your shit, we’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little styrofoam. The planet will be here and we’ll be gone. Another failed mutation. Another closed-end biological mistake. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, and it will heal itself, because that’s what the planet does – it’s a self-correcting system. The air and water and earth recover and be renewed, and if plastic is not degradable, well, most likely, the Earth will include it in a new paradigm. Earth plus plastic. The Earth doesn’t share our prejudice against plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth; She probably sees it as one of her many children. In fact, it could be the reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned in the first place – it wanted plastic and didn’t know how to make it. It needed us. That could be the answer to our age-old question: why are we here? Plastic, assholes! ibid.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. Stephen Hawking
We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Stephen Hawking
I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of sceptically and dictatorially. E B White
The evidence for slow change was everywhere. Geologists looked at waterfalls, and saw how the constant flow of water had gradually eroded the surrounding rock. They saw how rain had inexorably worn away the tops of mountains. And how the slow movement of glaciers had carved out entire valleys. They came to realise that the single most important factor in why the world looks the way it does was Time. And lots of it. Michael Mosley, The Power of Science: Power, Proof & Passion, BBC 2010
In attempting to explain these mysteries [Alfred] Wegener would transform geology. Science would have to embrace a new very different history of life on Earth. ibid.
It’s now clear that the story of life and the story of our planet which were once seen as separate are actually intrinsically linked. The evolution of new life has been driven by climate change, by asteroid impacts and by the slow motion collision of continents. It turns out that we and every other living creature are marching to the drumbeat of our violent planet. ibid.
Control of space means control of the world. From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause draught and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change the climates to frigid. There is something more important than the ultimate weapon. And that is the ultimate position. The position of total control over Earth that lies somewhere in outer space. Lyndon B Johnson
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Henry David Thoreau, Walden
What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? Henry David Thoreau, Familiar Letters
If [the earth] goes, we go. And so we should go elsewhere, so that when the earth goes, we have another place to go. And while we’re at it, we should take our pets and plants too. We wouldn’t want to be without them, just as they wouldn't want to be without us – even if they don’t know it. It’s our job to know things, and to act accordingly. And if we fail at that mission, then we really will have failed in upholding our end of the Burkean bargain – that is, partnering not only with the living and the dead, but with those who are yet to be born. James Pinkerton, The Ultimate Lifeboat, 2006
But are black holes limited into outer space? Some are now asking the question, is it possible that the forces that created black holes are here on Earth? Decoding the Past s3e6: Earth’s Black Hole, History 2007
An extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.
Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars ... We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of nature and the forces that sculpted this work ... and we, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts about our origins ... star stuff contemplating the stars, organised collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth ... Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring.
We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Carl Sagan, 1934-1996