Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do – back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning. Friedrich Nietzsche
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. Kurt Vonnegut
You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was ‘designed’ to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow ‘timed’ to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity. Christopher Hitchens
On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet’s history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
… to return to their ‘native soil’, as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! – and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! – high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winder, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world. Jack Kerouac, Windblown World
Contentment is next to impossible when one gazes upon the reckless abuses of Earth. Heath Byers
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology
Been living on this earth for so long now and still don’t know what a happy life feels like. I’m ready for a change. Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the Earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home ... the Earth’s biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have. Joseph Guth
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere. C S Lewis
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth? George Bernard Shaw
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. George Orwell
Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we’re still at the mercy of nature. Neil deGrasse Tyson
The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights. John Paul Getty
Think of the Earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die. Gore Vidal
What region of Earth is not full of our calamities? Virgil
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen! Alfred Lord Tennyson
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. Clarence Darrow
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight. Thomas Hardy
Every day the Earth is pelted with twenty-five tons of dust and sand-sized particles, but they burn up in our atmosphere. Extreme Universe s1e2: Collision Course, National Geographic 2010
Imagine if our planet’s eventful history was compressed into the twenty-four hours of a single day. At midnight the infant Earth was born ... At sixteen minutes past midnight a cataclysmic collision created our moon ... Then just before one o’clock in the morning the scene was set for ... the origin of life ... It took more than seven hours for all the iron to be removed from the oceans till one p.m. in the afternoon ... Over the next eight hours the microbes raised the level of oxygen ... It took only the last three hours of our twenty-four day for all the other life-forms on our planet to evolve. The first multi-cellular life emerged at six minutes past nine in the evening. The first fish at twenty-two minutes past nine ... By ten to eleven in the evening dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The first primates appeared at twenty to midnight. And with just thirty seconds to go, the first humans made their appearance. Tiny microbes had ruled the planet for over three billion years – two-thirds of the history of the Earth. The Day the Earth was Born, Channel 4 2002
The best explanation we have for the origin of life on Earth is that it is the result of an accumulation of organic molecules; these organic molecules are probably produced from the primitive atmosphere of the Earth by the actions of various kinds of energy: electrical discharges, heat from volcanoes, the ultraviolet light from the sun – all these would have combined together to give what has been described as a primordial soup. Professor Cyril Ponnamperuma, interview Horizon: Message in the Rocks, BBC 1979
What have we done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and did her,
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn,
And tied her with fences and dragged her down.
I hear a very gentle sound,
With your ear down to the ground:
We want the world and we want it now! Jim Morrison, The Doors, When the Music’s Over, song 1967
Earth: the only life-sustaining planet in our Solar System. Yet throughout its history our world has been a planetary punching bag … They are racing to track down these cosmic killers before they trigger Armageddon. The Universe s1e3: End of the Earth, History 2007
Scientists call these trespassers Near Earth Objects or NEOs. ibid.
Earth still remains one of the most wondrous and mystifying creations in the universe. The Universe s1e6: Spaceship Earth
Three-quarters of the sphere is covered in water. ibid.
As the boulders grew larger so did the collisions. ibid.
Formation of the Earth’s core, sometimes called the Iron Catastrophe, occurred within the first forty million years of our planet’s existence. It had a profound effect on the Earth’s future. ibid.
Where did Earth get the water from? ibid.
The Asteroid Belt [is] located between Mars and Jupiter. These warm ice-bearing bodies may have the same water as Earth because they were all formed in the inner solar system which is closer to the Sun. What’s more, startling new evidence suggests that these usual comets may not only have delivered water to Earth, they may also have seeded our planet with the building blocks of life itself. ibid.
Could primitive life have survived a caustic environment? ibid.
Could the building blocks of life have come from somewhere else? Perhaps from an extraterrestrial object. ibid.
Consensus that the first life-forms were single-celled organisms that lived in the oceans. ibid.