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There really is something intrinsic in humans to want to explore. Joel Park, co-investigator of New Horizons, cited Secrets of the Solar System: Pluto & the Outer Planets, BBC 2020
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Professor Carl Sagan
This is the age of planetary exploration. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Heaven and Hell, PBS 1980
If the human race is to continue for another million years we will have to boldly go where no-one has gone before. Spreading out into space will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all. We could have a base on the Moon within thirty years and reach Mars in fifty years, and explore the moons of the outer planets in two-hundred years. Professor Stephen Hawking
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
Bush staged a grand photo opportunity at NASA, using the American Space Program as a grand charade, making a speech from NASA headquarters about the future exploration of space. But the speech by George W Bush is not about the exploration of space, it is more about the exploitation of space. The US government has weaponised space. Chris Everard, Secret Space II
The human race has constantly endeavoured to extend its reach, and now it’s heading for the final frontier. From an outpost on the moon to a fully fledged colony on Mars. We’re building the rockets that will transport us there. And the machines we’ll need to survive. The Universe s2e13: Colonising Space, History 2008
They are humanity eyes and ears in deep space ... Space probes – robotic explorers that are humanity’s intergalactic avatars. The Universe: Space Probes
Let me end with an explanation of why I believe the move into space to be a human imperative. It seems to me obvious in too many ways to need listing that we cannot much longer depend upon our planet’s relatively fragile ecosystem to handle the realities of the human tomorrow. Unless we turn human growth and energy toward the challenges and promises of space, our only other choice may be the awful risk, currently demonstrable, of stumbling into a cycle of fratricide and regression which could end all chances of our evolving further or of even surviving. Gene Roddenberry, Planetary Report I, 1981
The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit. The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit. The most compelling reason, a very long-term one, is the necessity of using space to protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity. William E Burrows, The Wall Street Journal, 2003
There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years? Isaac Asimov
Remember this: once the human race is established on more than one planet, and especially in more than one solar system, there is no way now imaginable to kill off the human race. Robert Heinlein, speech World Science Fiction Convention, 1961
Despite the campaign rhetoric, the bureaucracies – big business and big government – are here to stay. The centralization effort cannot be checked, but it can be rationally directed towards our species goal: Space Migration, which in turn offers the only way to re-attain individual freedom of space-time and the small-group social structures which obviously best suit our nervous systems. It is another paradox of neuro-genetics that only in space habitats can humanity return to the village life and pastoral style for which we all long. Timothy Leary, Neuropolitics, 1977
Perhaps it won’t matter, in the end, which country is the sower of the seed of exploration. The importance will be in the growth of the new plant of progress and in the fruits it will bear. These fruits will be a new breed of the human species, a human with new views, new vigor, new resiliency, and a new view of the human purpose. The plant: the tree of human destiny. Neil Armstrong, Out of This World, Saturday Review 1974
Now, more than ever, we need people in space ... The events of September 11 show us how vulnerable we and our civilization are down here on Earth ... So let us use our strength, our awareness of mortality as a civilization, to do something truly lasting and earth-shaking for humanity. Let us join with the peoples and cultures of this planet, the diversities of its perspectives and religions and science, so we can leave it – not behind, but as a springboard to something better. Paul Levinson, Realspace, 2003
Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life’s long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth ... Will this happen before our technological civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth. Martin Rees, Our Final Hour, 2003
Many people are shrinking from the future and from participation in the movement toward a new, expanded reality. And, like homesick travellers abroad, they are focusing their anxieties on home. The reasons are not far to seek. We are at a turning point in human history ... We could turn our attention to the problems that going to the moon certainly will not solve ... But I think this would be fatal to our future ... A society that no longer moves forward does not merely stagnate; it begins to die. Margaret Mead, Man on the Moon, 1969
I believe we need a long-term national commitment to explore the universe. And I believe this is an essential investment in the future of our nation – and our beautiful, but environmentally challenged planet. Gene Kranz, interview Space Lifeguard 11th April 2000
The first in a line of Janeway explorers. Star Trek: Voyager s5e23: 11:59, Janeway of Shannon O’Donnell
July 1769 the South Pacific: Lieutenant James Cook is on a secret mission for the British government: his orders to go in search of the fabled southern continent. The British V: Superpower, Sky Atlantic 2012
Travelling with Cook is a young botanist – Joseph Banks. ibid.
America’s greatest explorer was murdered carrying secret presidential codes? In 1809 Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark is the sitting governor in the Louisiana territory when he dies in Tennessee. Brad Meltzer’s Decoded s1e2: Secret Presidential Codes, History 2010
Where’s Jefferson been this whole time? How could he have just accepted Lewis killed himself with no questions asked? ibid.
The North Pole: majestic, wild, disputed ... A hundred years ago the Pole was at the centre of a bitter dispute between the two men who claimed to have got there first: Dr Frederick A Cook and Robert E Peary. These gentlemen rivals indulged in the most vicious mudslinging in the history of exploration. Until Robert E Peary finally came out the winner. But today his own records cast doubt on his claims. North Pole Conspiracy, 2010
The object of this year’s expedition is to see if we can see what happened to last year’s expedition. Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different, Sir George Head, 1972
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. T S Eliot, Four Quartets ‘Little Gidding’
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science. Edwin Powell Hubble