Planetary Impact Quotes

When you look at Earth from that one picture, the one from space, it's really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.

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.

We are playing Russian roulette with features of the planet’s atmosphere that will profoundly impact generations to come. How long are we willing to gamble?

Donald Trump isn't doing anyone any favors by running to be the most powerful person on the planet, right?

Most individuals have always thought themselves not big enough or significant enough to have an effect on the whole planet, a notion which conversely made them think they could afford big arrogance and big greed over its resources.

There are so many symptoms of this disease it's hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology - on the way water moves around the planet.

Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one.

Astrology is a science in itself and contains an illuminating body of knowledge. It taught me many things and I am greatly indebted to it. Geophysical evidence reveals the power of the stars and the planets in relation to the terrestrial. In turn, astrology reinforces this power to some extent. This is why astrology is like a life-giving elixir to mankind.

My role on the planet is to bring the power of sound.

The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.

With the collision of the Shoemaker comet into Jupiter, the era of uniformitarian orthodoxy must come to an end. Minds that have been closed for nearly half a millennium can now be opened to see what really has happened to our planet in the past -- and that past is not as distant as we might suppose.

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

I just think we're on this rock orbiting a sun that's going to go out, and I don't know that human society is necessarily a wonderful thing for the planet. I think people can be kind to one another and share things, but I don't know that this particular iteration of civilization is to be preferred to any other.

As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.

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.

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.

Now, humans have become a dominant force of planetary change and, thus, we may have entered an eon of post-biological evolution in which cognitive systems have gained a powerful influence on the planet.

To me, inner and outer are so strongly linked that any collective change that happens within human beings, within the human psyche, inevitably will be reflected externally in what happens on the whole planet.

Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.

Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite.

But there was something about the largest object in the solar system vanishing that tended to disrupt normal schedules.

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.

Ultimately, human intentionality is the most powerful evolutionary force on this planet.

Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.