Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
The question arises, Might there have been a visit to the Earth in historical times? ... It’s a kind of modern dress for old-time religion ... You can’t exclude the possibility but there is not a smidgen of evidence that is compelling. Carl Sagan, interview In Search of Ancient Astronauts, 1973
Why should this modest planet be the only inhabited world? To me it seems far more likely the cosmos is brimming over with life and intelligence. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean, PBS 1980
Welcome to the planet Earth. A place with blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests, soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective, it is for the moment unique. ibid.
And yet we ravage the Earth at an accelerated pace as if it belonged to this one generation, as if were ours to do with as we please. Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Heaven and Hell
If we ruin the Earth, there is no place else to go. ibid.
The Earth need not resemble Venus very closely for it to become barren and lifeless. It may not take much to destabilise the Earth’s climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell. ibid.
Not everyone would be killed by the blast and the firestorm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies: the loss of loved ones, legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated, the absence of medical care, disease, plague, long-lived radiation, poison in the soil and the water, the threat of tumors and still-births, the mal-formed children, and the hopeless sense of civilisation destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did not. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Who Speaks for Earth?
3,923. The old appeals to racial, sexual, religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervour, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism, and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. ibid.
There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The entire surface of the Earth will be incinerated. Craig DeForest, Southwest Research Institute
It’s so huge that more than a million Earths would fit inside it ... But our Sun is also violent and volatile, and becoming more dangerous as it ages. It will get hotter and thousands of times brighter, evaporate away our oceans, melt the surface of the planet and make life on Earth impossible. Death of the Sun, 2006
The sun is four hundred times the diameter of the moon, but by sheer coincidence it is four hundred times further away from the Earth. Brian Cox: Wonders of the Solar System, BBC 2010
Beyond Earth’s atmosphere life is impossible. Exposed to the vacuum of space you’d be unconscious within twelve seconds. Brian Cox, Human Universe, BBC 2014
The International Space Station has been permanently occupied. ibid.
As far as we know we humans are unique in the universe. ibid.
At its peak Petra had a population of 30,000. ibid.
76,590. Each one of us is made from mere matter. Yet we are matter with curiosity ... Why are we here? Brian Cox, Human Universe II: Why Are We Here?
We appear to live on a perfect planet in a perfect universe. It feels as if it’s made for us. The Earth orbits at just the right distance around just the right star with the temperatures on its surface to be just right for liquid water to exist. ibid.
We live in a universe that’s expanding at just the right rate. ibid.
‘The gods are later than creation.’ ibid. Vadic verse
Are we a lone island of life lost in a vast galaxy? Brian Cox, Human Universe III: Are We Alone? BBC 2014
Red Dwarfs are by far the most numerous stars in our galaxy. ibid.
There are ten billion inhabitable worlds out there in the Milky Way Galaxy. ibid.
The question of how often Life spontaneously arises on a planet. ibid.
The silence persists; we remain alone ... We are unique. ibid.
Every human life has to start somewhere, a place in Space and Time. Brian Cox, Human Universe IV: A Place in Space and Time
The Milky Way is a disc of between two and four hundred billion stars reaching out in giant spiral arms. ibid.
Our inquisitive minds began to develop models of the universe. Brian Cox, Human Universe: What is Our Future? V
The Earth teems with life. But billions of years ago our planet was just a ball of molten rock. Did the first earthlings rise from a chemical soup bubbling in a primordial pond, or did the seeds of life crash down from outer space? Morgan Freeman’s Through The Wormhole s1e5: How Did We Get Here? Science 2010
Life on Earth may not have been from Earth at all. ibid.
The sun also holds a dark secret: some day it will bake the Earth in a fiery holocaust. Can we move to a new home in the Cosmos? ... Can we survive the death of the Sun? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s4e3: Can We Survive the Death of the Sun?
After the Sun destroys Earth, it burns helium for two billion years, runs out of fuel and collapses into a tiny dim white dwarf star. ibid.
Humanity’s under threat from storms that seem to get fiercer, from earthquakes that are ever more deadly, and killer viruses that engulf the globe. Are we powerful against these forces of nature or is it time for us to fight back against planet Earth? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s7e8: Can We Hack the Planet?
Especially when an event like a solar maximum occurs. That’s when massive eruptions from the sun’s surface send billions of charged particles into space some of which reach the Earth. Now events like this don’t happen all the time but solar scientists say there’s one just around the corner. And it poses a major threat. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, interview Stephen Hawking’s Brave New World, Channel 4 2011
These events are known as Coronal Mass Ejections. ibid.
In the past a day wasn’t twenty-four hours ... The Earth must have been spinning faster ... The gravitational pull of the moon has been putting a break on the Earth. Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Do We Really Need the Moon? BBC 2011
As the moon moves away from us, how will life change here on Earth? ibid.
The moon which controls our tides and the spin of the Earth serves another critical function. It keeps us stable. ibid.
A tiny shift [of the Moon] and life on Earth could be very different. ibid.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
If the moon travels just 10% further from where it resides today – 40,000 kilometres or so – we’ll reach a point of no return. That’s when the Earth’s rotation becomes chaotic, unpredictable and unable to support nearly all forms of life. Earth Without the Moon, National Geographic
The moon is spinning away from us at three point four centimetres per year. ibid.
As Apollo 8 hurtles at 24,000 miles per hour to the moon, the crew is given the first ever view of the whole Earth as a globe. Back on Earth, hundreds of millions of people are peering back towards them in stunned fascination. NASA: Triumph and Tragedy, BBC 2009
Planet Earth: a sphere of rock suspended in the vast blackness of space ... 4.6 billion years have passed since the dawn of Earth’s history. Horizon: Message in the Rocks, BBC 1978
Bombardment by meteorites and debris left over from the start of the solar system produced enormous heat. ibid.
Coal is less than one-fifteen the age of the Earth. ibid.
In the Spring of 1896 Henry Bequerel’s discovery of radioactivity opened up a whole new dimension to geological dating of the Earth. Six years later Ernest Rutherford realised that the law of radioactive decay could be used to date rocks. ibid.
Its rocks carry clues about the earliest years of its history. The moon reveals the scars of this bombardment which must also have hit the Earth. ibid.
The Earth developed a large core of iron. ibid.
Sedimentary rocks provide evidence of the history of oceans. ibid.