Our Solar System Quotes

#1. A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.

Carl Sagan

#2. Life is extremely resilient once it takes hold, but it requires rich chemistry, large energy sources, and stability, right from the beginning. The comparative planetology of our solar system makes it seem like those initial conditions are hard to come by.

Dimitar Sasselov

#3. I get scared thinking about the yawning void of space and the maddening smallness of our solar system in it, and the smallness of our planet in that solar system and of my own voice in the dark.

Joey Comeau

#4. It's feasible that we'll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them. We don't now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learning fast how to get somewhere few think possible.

Dimitar Sasselov

#5. The great spirals, with their enormous radial velocities and insensible proper motions, apparently lie outside our Solar system.

Edwin Powell Hubble

#6. In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.

Martin Rees

#7. But one of the coolest things about meteorites is that most were formed four-and-a-half-billion years ago, during the birth of our solar system, when, for reasons not yet known, a cloud of gas and dust was transformed into a sun with circling planets.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#8. The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.

Ellen Stofan

#9. Of all the planets apart from Earth in our solar system, Mars is the most hospitable. Yeah. Right. Better keep my visit short. And yet, despite the discomfort, the danger, I love it here. I love coming back for these imaginary vacations. The sights are amazing.

Greg Bear

#10. Imagine a cell in your body, then your body relative to the planet. Imagine the planet in the solar system, our solar system in the universe. Now imagine that our universe is to something greater what a cell in our body is to our universe. There is so much that we cannot comprehend.

Aaron B. Powell

#11. The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork.

Walter Lang

#12. The planet Earth, though not threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no means indestructible. There are many unpredictable events within our solar system, and still more outside it, that could make Earth uninhabitable by humans.

Paul Johnson

#13. It's ridiculous that our solar system, not to mention the universe outside of that, is extraordinarily well organized, to the point where we can predict 70 years away when a comet is coming.

Benjamin Carson

#14. A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time.

Seth Shostak

#15. The planets and moons of our solar system are blatantly visible because they reflect sunlight. Without the nearby Sun, these planets would be cryptic and dark on the sky.

Seth Shostak

#16. The African versions were created by beings from a nomadic, artificial planet known as Niburu, or Marduk. These Reptilian-like beings travel in a manufactured world looping our solar system. The Sumerians called them Annunnakki.

Stewart A. Swerdlow

#17. We would not find any human species outside our solar system, unless the same environment like earth exists.

Joey Lawsin

#18. Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth.

Michio Kaku

#19. It is foolish to claim, as some do, that emigration into space offers a long-term escape from Earth's problems. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest.

Martin Rees

#20. The world needs specialists and highly trained people with advanced degrees, no question about it. But the world also needs diversity and versatility. It needs people who know as much about our value system as they do about our solar system.

Roger Smith

#21. In days gone by, scientists would speak solemnly about our solar system's 'habitable zone' - a theoretical region extending from Venus to Mars, but perhaps not encompassing either, where a planet would be the right temperature to have liquid water on its surface.

Seth Shostak

#22. Of all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our Solar System, there is fire only on Earth - because there are large amounts of oxygen gas, O2, only on Earth. Fire was, much later, to have profound consequences for life and intelligence. One thing leads to another.

Carl Sagan

#23. The cosmos is three times as old as Earth. During most of creation's 14 billion year history, our solar system wasn't around. Nonetheless, the early universe still had the right stuff for life, and contained worlds that were just as suitable for spawning biology and intelligence as our own.

Seth Shostak

#24. Deciding to spit in the eye of every homely matron who ever warned her children not to stare into the sun directly, you crank the titanic telescope around to look directly towards the sun, the center of our solar system.

Daniel Keidl

#25. Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system.

Adam Riess

#26. Terraforming our moon will take many decades and vast abilities. Before we can begin, we'll have to master the resources of our solar system - especially transporting raw masses over interplanetary distances.

Gregory Benford

#27. It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.

Johannes Stark

#28. Once solved, the severe handicaps imposed on space exploration by the weight and chemical limitations of rockets would no longer apply. The whole timetable of our conquest of the planets in our solar system would be tremendously speeded up, from hot Mercury all the way out to frigid Pluto.

Donald A. Wollheim

#29. It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most populous class of planet in our solar system and we have never sent a mission to this class.

Alan Stern

#30. Proof of the black hole is a tremendous amount of mass inside a very small volume. There's 4 million times the mass of our sun within a region that's comparable to the size of our solar system.

Andrea M. Ghez

#31. The world, when you look at it, it just can't be random. I mean, it's so different than the vast emptiness that is everything else, and even all the other planets we've seen, at least in our solar system, none of them even remotely resemble the precious life-giving nature of our own planet.

Chris Hadfield

#32. All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we're the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.

Martin Rees

#33. As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end.

Bruce Hood

#34. Luckily, there are some rocks left over from our earliest days, asteroids formed during our solar system's birth. Occasionally, some of them drop in on Earth, and when they do, they're called meteorites.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#35. We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.

Edgar Mitchell

#36. So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.

Carl Sagan

#37. The secret of our success on planet Earth is space. Lots of it. Our solar system is a tiny island of activity in an ocean of emptiness.

Paul Davies

#38. Our solar system is fantastically bizarre. There are worlds with features we never imagined. Storms larger than planets, moons with under-surface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that swap places ... and that's just at Saturn.

Phil Plait

#39. When I was a kid, I was a bit of a space geek. I loved the space program and all things NASA. I would read books about our solar system; I had pictures of the Space Shuttle on my bedroom wall. And yes, I even went to Space Camp.

Simon Sinek

#40. I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard - explored not only with robots, but with the mind, body, and soul of our species.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#41. Let our government be like that of the solar system. Let the general government be like the sun and the states the planets, repelled yet attracted, and the whole moving regularly and harmoniously in several orbits.

John Dickinson

#42. Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isn't. Our galaxy is a huge disk of stars millions of light-years across, and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disk.

Mark Haddon

#43. Pride is yet again in the way of our mind's ability to accept that we may not be the most intelligent and advanced people in the universe or on Earth since it was formed along with the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

Mario Stinger

#44. But what did we really know, even of one another? We never thought of a future. Our small solar system - what was it heading towards? And how long would each of us mean something to the others?

Michael Ondaatje

#45. For planetary explorers like us, there is little that can compare to the sighting of activity on another solar system body. This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one of our most thrilling results.

Carolyn Porco

#46. Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.

Seth Shostak

#47. What we expect to find, certainly in our own solar system, are probably simple single or multiple-cell forms of life. To get to intelligent life takes stability of conditions over huge, long periods of time.

Ellen Stofan

#48. Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system - ever.

Bill Bryson

#49. Now when we think that each of these stars is probably the centre of a solar system grander than our own, we cannot seriously take ourselves to be the only minds in it all.

Percival Lowell

#50. Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

Annie Dillard

#51. 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

#52. Changes, cyclic or otherwise, within the solar system or within our galaxy, would seem to be the easy and incontrovertible solution for everything that I have found remarkable in the stratigraphical record.

D. V. Ager

#53. We're particularly anxious to get our hands on Pioneer 10 - the first man-made object to escape from the Solar System.

Arthur C. Clarke

#54. Music can be all things to all persons. It is like a great dynamic sun in the center of a solar system which sends out its rays and inspiration in every direction ... Music makes us feel that the heavens open and a divine voice calls. Something in our souls responds and understands.

Leopold Stokowski

#55. There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#56. It is humanity's destiny to explore the universe. When we start thinking and working on that cosmic level, we will transcend our parochial differences and tribal natures and become global creatures, solar system creatures. Then we will figure out where we fit in.

Story Musgrave

#57. The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#58. If you took all the sand from all the beaches, all the desserts, and all the oceans and called that the Universe, our whole solar system would be less than one grain of sand.

Seth Shostak

#59. Despite the immense distance between our own solar system (including the earth) and the nearest other solar systems, a journey from one system to another is theoretically possible, once an unlimited source of power is developed.

Hermann Oberth

#60. Water-based life is very much an Earth-centric view, and we can push the envelope on that here in our own solar system. We have the methane seas of Titan.

Ellen Stofan

#61. If humans escape the solar system and outlive the Sun, our descendants may someday live on one of these planets. Atoms from Times Square, cycled through the heart of the Sun, will form our new bodies. One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers.

Randall Munroe

#62. It is my conclusion that UFOs do exist, are very real, and are spaceships from another or more than one solar system. They are possibly manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race carrying out long-range scientific investigations of our earth for centuries.

Hermann Oberth

#63. All the atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the solar system, to live on forever as mass or energy. That's what we should be teaching our children, not fairy tales about angels and seeing grandma in Heaven.

Carolyn Porco

#64. The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what is in our own solar system. Now,

Bill Bryson

#65. We all live within our belief solar systems; it's how we make it through each day. What feels "real" and "true" is based on it. Internal consistency and function means that a belief solar system is simply livable, but it says nothing about its veracity.

Daniel Ionson

#66. In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.

Carl Sagan

#67. Love is a universal force, like gravity, that holds the solar system together and pours into our hearts as life-force - and gets expressed to us most beautifully by small children and animals.

Christiane Northrup

#68. The need to create a new taxonomy that isn't just applying to our own solar system will become so evident and apparent that something will come out of it. I'm sure of it, even if it's not tomorrow.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#69. The sun of God's glory was made to shine at the center of the solar system of our soul. And when it does, all the planets of our life are held in their proper orbit.

John Piper

#70. Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.

Eric Chaisson