Asteroid Quotes

#1. Americans who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility - about 1 in 45,000 - that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036.

Rusty Schweickart

#2. Happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations ...

Dave Barry

#3. The stars look the same from night to night. Nebulae and galaxies are dully immutable, maintaining the same overall appearance for thousands or millions of years. Indeed, only the sun, moon and planets - together with the occasional comet, asteroid or meteor - seem dynamic.

Seth Shostak

#4. [L]ean start-ups are the small furry mammals competing with the large dinosaurs - meaning they're one asteroid strike away from world dominance. Exponential technology is that asteroid.

Peter H. Diamandis

#5. It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.

Rusty Schweickart

#6. It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything.

Robert T. Bakker

#7. Why do they call it an asteroid when it's outside the hemisphere, but call it a haemorrhoid when it's on the outside of your ass?

Billy Connolly

#8. The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.

Ridley Scott

#9. This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

L. Neil Smith

#10. When you look at the origins and evolution of life on Earth, it's been severely affected by asteroid impacts through history.

Rusty Schweickart

#11. Well, we had our shot. And we werent handling our inheritance very well. I bet if we could somehow go back and interview the dinosaurs before the asteroid struck..

Rick Yancey

#12. If an asteroid is coming toward you, you don't have to blow it up. You just have to slow it down long enough for our country to rotate out of the way.

Emo Philips

#13. We have the capability - physically, technically - to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival.

Rusty Schweickart

#14. Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It's just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision.

Ben H. Winters

#15. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?

Arthur Conan Doyle

#16. They discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

Douglas Adams

#17. An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

Rusty Schweickart

#18. Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

Mark Twain

#19. A mission where you have to blow up a Death Star while being attacked by two Borg Cubes inside an asteroid field?

Ernest Cline

#20. If human is capable of conducting genocide,
no need for an asteroid to wipe out dinosaurs.

Toba Beta

#21. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems.

Jared Diamond

#22. As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

Peter Diamandis

#23. The language itself is what gets me interested in writing. It's weird to me that words exist. Never a dull moment with words. They're a layer between our minds and the physical reality around us, obviously, but the layer seems like it's always in flux, like an asteroid belt, constantly moving.

Aaron Belz

#24. What?" Holden said, a brief image of the asteroid sneaking up like a cartoon villain on the two circling warships popping into his head. "Yeah,

James S.A. Corey

#25. Percy threw his arms around her. They kissed, and for a moment nothing else mattered. An asteroid could have hit the planet and wiped out all life, and Annabeth wouldn't have cared.

Rick Riordan

#26. "Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out, But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe."

Stephen Hawking

#27. Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

Michio Kaku

#28. We are involved in technology development for, you know, missions that we hope to plan that would take us to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

Ellen Ochoa

#29. After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.

Dean Koontz

#30. The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#31. Research into manned spaceflight is shifting from low-Earth orbit to destinations much further away, like Mars and the asteroid belt. But society will have to invent many new technologies before it can plausibly send people to those distances.

Andy Weir

#32. And you know, talk about something else is falling from the sky. And that is an asteroid. What's coming our way? Is this an effect of perhaps global warming or just some meteoric occasion?

Deborah Feyerick

#33. A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight.

Buzz Aldrin

#34. When he says "when it all first started up," he means early summer of last year, when the asteroid entered the public consciousness in a serious way.

Ben H. Winters

#35. We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

Larry Niven

#36. The average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour.

Bill Bryson

#37. Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

Ramez Naam

#38. What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.

Timothy Noah

#39. I despise the Lottery. There's less chance of you becoming a millionaire than there is of getting hit on the head by a passing asteroid.

Brian May

#40. An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not - and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. They're the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#41. Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.

Nathan Myhrvold

#42. Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What's that have to do with space exploration? If we were moving outward from there, and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it's turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration.

Buzz Aldrin

#43. It would be great if we were on multiple planets, but I think that's unrealistic. Hawking says we have to be on multiple planets so an asteroid could come and you'd still have some humans left. It's a nice idea. It satisfies the multiple-eggs-in-multiple-baskets concept.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#44. When you have an asteroid threatening Earth, it's uncertain where it's going to hit until the last minute; the decision to take action has to be coordinated by the international community.

Rusty Schweickart

#45. 1908: A massive explosion over Tunguska, Siberia, leveled sixty to eighty million trees over 2,150 square kilometers. Blamed on an asteroid or comet, or Nikola Tesla's Coil. The Bermuda Triangle J

Catherine Coulter

#46. We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#47. If you need to stop an asteroid, you call Superman. If you need to solve a mystery, you call Batman. But if you need to end a war, you call Wonder Woman.

Gail Simone

#48. The asteroids interfere with the collapsing function of each emerging ship; in effect, either forcing them to abandon the transit, or to combine asteroid mass with the ship's.

Greg Bear

#49. My record producer [David Kahne] said the major record labels these days are like dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid. They know it's going to hit. They don't know when, they don't know where it's coming from. But it's sort of hit already. With iTunes, and all of that.

Paul McCartney

#50. When you need to stop an asteroid, you get Superman. When you need to solve a mystery, you call Batman. But when you need to end a war, you get Wonder Woman.

Gail Simone

#51. If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws, imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse.

Stephen Hawking

#52. Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.

Edward M. Lerner

#53. I thought I loved Daren, and I did in a butterfly-and-hearts kind of way, but it was nothing like this. This is an asteroid shower on a summer night. A tidal wave crashing onto the breakers. Falling over the edge of Niagara Falls in an inner tube. Because I have fallen, irreparably for Gavin Murphy

Lex Martin

#54. She pressed her lips together and held his gaze, then shook her head as if all out of arguments. "You're really going to do it then. You're going to drive an asteroid to Earth. You're going to be the bad guy who kills everyone. You're actually going to finish what the Icefall started.

Walt Stone

#55. The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but one weedy species.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#56. Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now [with climate change], yet we dither.

James Hansen

#57. Democrats do have a historic race going. Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama. Normally, when you see a black man or a woman president an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.

Jon Stewart

#58. I think I need to continue to think and plan and marry all of the different things that we could do that make transportation in space from the earth to the space station, from the earth to the moon to space stations around the moon to visiting an asteroid.

Buzz Aldrin

#59. Richard Pilbrow's lighting can turn a coin into an asteroid and an idea into an apparition.

Jack Kroll

#60. If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

Bill Nye

#61. By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.

Rusty Schweickart

#62. We made and spent at least 10 million dollars. The thing is, we heard that the planet was going to end in 2012. We thought, We have got to spend this money before the asteroid hits.

Spencer Pratt

#63. Caltech honored me
they named an asteroid after me. There's only two of them up there with names. One of them is Walter Cronkite. The other is Tommy Lasorda.

Tommy Lasorda

#64. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#65. Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.

Nathan Myhrvold

#66. He's weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It's exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it's an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy's skirts.

Ben H. Winters

#67. There's no accepted global policy on what to do about asteroid impacts.

Rusty Schweickart

#68. Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#69. Newsreader: A huge asteroid could destroy Earth! And by coincidence, that's the subject of tonight's miniseries. Dogbert: In science, researchers proved that this simple device can keep idiots off your television screen. [TV remote control] Click.

Scott Adams

#70. The pole's center was a gleaming lump about the size of a person's head, which any Spacer would recognize as a small nickel-iron asteroid, as common in space as dead leaves were on the reforested surface. But rare down here, even after the Hard Rain.

Neal Stephenson

#71. Todays the first anniversary of the asteroid hitting the moon. A year ago i was sixteen years old, a sophomore in high school.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

#72. Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.

Douglas Coupland

#73. Mars could very well be a staging location for the resources of the asteroid belt. We have to learn how to get a payback somewhere, but it's beyond Mars that the real payoff will come from minerals.

Buzz Aldrin

#74. I've seen Australia and I've lived on an asteroid and I'd take the asteroid.

Orson Scott Card

#75. Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago.

Sam Kean

#76. I'm extraordinarily passionate about the idea of asteroid mining in the future. Asteroids out there, we know them from those that have fallen on the Earth, there is a class of asteroids, sub-class of nickel/iron asteroids, which are 50,000 times more enriched than Platinum mines on earth.

Peter Diamandis

#77. An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

Elon Musk

#78. I only hope that we shall not wait to adopt the program until after our astronomers have reported a new and unsuspected asteroid moving across their fields of vision with menacing speed. At that point it will be too late!

Wernher Von Braun

#79. The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside. The seventh chamber went on forever.

Greg Bear

#80. Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.

Stephen Graham Jones

#81. What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

Dave Barry

#82. Knowing that an asteroid is going to hit the earth is not really useful if you are not planning to launch missiles to knock it out of the sky. You have to work massively overtime on the belief that innovation or massive change is going to happen.' - Tom Martin, former VP of marketing

Heather Simmons

#83. If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?

Randall Munroe

#84. I don't much like assuming the tone of a moralist. But the danger of baobabs is so little recognized, and the risks run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid are so considerable, that for once I am making an exception to my habitual reserve.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#85. Chiron reminds us that only through recognising and accepting our inner wounds can we find true healing.

Lisa Tenzin-Dolma