There are almost no important differences between apes and humans. Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue
We got smarter. We began to talk. Many collateral branches of the human family became extinct in the last few hundred million years. We with our brains and our hands are the survivors. There is an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us. ibid.
If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
The whole system that we live in drills into us that we’re powerless, that we’re weak, that our society is evil, that it is crowded etc. and so forth. It’s all a big fat lie. We are powerful, beautiful, extraordinary. There is no reason why we cannot understand who we truly are, where we are going. There is no reason why the average human being cannot be fully empowered. We are incredibly powerful beings. Carl Sagan
We should be a two-planet species ... Carl Sagan, the great noted astronomer once said, ‘We need to be a two-planet species.’ Professor Michio Kaku
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
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
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
In my own view, the important achievement of Apollo was a demonstration that humanity is not forever chained to this planet, and our visions go rather further than that, and our opportunities are unlimited. Neil Armstrong, press conference 1999
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
Looking up and out, how can we not respect this ever-vigilant cognizance that distinguishes us: the capability to envision, to dream, and to invent? The ability to ponder ourselves? And be aware of our existence on the outer arm of a spiral galaxy in an immeasurable ocean of stars? Cognizance is our crest. Vanna Bonta
There is a moment in the near future that scientists believe will transform the notion of what it is to be human. By conducting some of the most controversial experiments, scientists are unlocking the secrets of the human brain, moving us towards the moment when it will be possible to store our minds in machines. Then we will be able to change what we are and who we are. Horizon: Human v2.0, BBC 2006
I believe that the Apollo moon landings were the greatest achievement in human history. Brian Cox, Moon: The Horizon Guide, BBC 2011
It’s long been known that millions of years ago one special creature walked here. These are fossilized footsteps from the dawn of mankind: the oldest footprints made by our human ancestor. For years scientists have been convinced that whatever creature walked here would hold the key to the biggest mystery of all evolution: why it is human beings have evolved to be so different, so unlike all the other animals. Now a new discovery may just provide the answer to that question. The Trouble is, it’s not what anyone had expected. Horizon: The Ape That Took Over the World, BBC 2001
The big mystery of human evolution began ten million years ago ... Back then one kind of creature reigned supreme: the apes. They were everywhere. The Earth really was the planet of the apes. ibid.
Over a hundred years ago the Big Brain Theory of human evolution was born. ibid.
It was not the skull of an antelope but of an ape-like creature. And it seemed to have an unusually large brain. The question was, Did it cross the magical cerebral Rubicon of six-hundred cubic centimetres? ibid.
Lucy ... Just older than #1470 ... This ape-like creature had one clear human characteristic. And it wasn’t a big brain ... She walked on two legs, not four ... They found Lucy’s footprints ... Lucy’s brain was just too small. ibid.
Two-legged Lucy was just over three million years old. ibid.
#1470 could be descended from Lucy ... The big brain theory was now in the bin ... We had walked on two legs ... Lucy now became the great iconic fossil. ibid.
Why intelligence should have evolved from moving on two legs doesn’t seem obvious. ibid.
Kenya ... A possible human ancestor. Was it the same species as Lucy? ... The difference between the new skull and Lucy was fundamental. They had to be different species ... The new skull was 3.5 billion years old, almost exactly the same age as Lucy. It meant they had found a possible different ancestor ... Lucy was not unique. Here was clear evidence of adaptive radiation in humans. And so in February this year they announced that they had discovered flat-faced man. ibid.
We did not defy the laws of nature. We are simply the ape that got lucky. ibid.
Hidden on the wild coast of South Africa where the Indian Ocean joins the Atlantic there is a cave. Today it is abandoned but once it teemed with life. For here tens of thousands of years ago some of our earliest ancestors lived. Horizon: The Day We Learned to Think, BBC 2003
When did our ancestors cease being brute animals and first become truly human? When did we learn to think? ibid.
For archaeologists this realisation that art, language and thought was all the same thing was a huge breakthrough. Suddenly what they had to look for was clear. Discover the earliest forms of human art and you would have found the day we learned to think. ibid.
And they found more: intricately worked statuettes. Thousands of pieces of jewellery. Here at last in Europe was the evidence archaeologists had been looked for ... And it all dated from the same period: about thirty-five thousand years ago. ibid.