Planetary Migration Quotes

If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.

Then, I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So, then, I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us, the way we moved next door to the American Indians.

We need to spread out now in the universe. I think in 100 years we'll be living on other planets.

A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets.

Earth is the nest, the cradle, and we'll move out of it.

Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.

I believe, I truly believe, that humans will be living off of this planet, at some point in the future. It's inevitable for us, and it seems like a reasonable and realistic progression for us as a human race. We won't last on this planet - not forever.

If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.

If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.

We need to move off the planet. And Mars is the next best place.

And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.

But space travel can't ease the pressure on a planet grown too crowded not even with today's ships and probably not with any future ships-because stupid people won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even when it starts to smoke and rumble. What space travel does do is drain off the best brains: those smart enough to see a catastrophe before it happens, and with the guts to pay the price-abandon home, wealth, friends, relatives, everything-and go. That's a tiny fraction of one percent. But that's enough.

As our sensitivity improves, we are finally seeing planets with longer orbital periods, planetary systems that look more like our solar system.

When discs form around stars, there is interaction of angular momentum between disc, planets and parent star, and this interaction affects the rotation of the parent star, and that will affect the lithium abundance.

The Stone trembled and threw herself outward bound, toward Saturn. In her train followed hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of thousands of restless, rolling Stones . . . to Saturn . . . to Uranus, to Pluto . . . rolling on out to the stars . . . outward bound to the ends of the Universe.

Mars would seem, to me, to be the best place to focus our collective effort as a species... I think people would like to experience something sort of hopeful in terms of where we go next... as a species.

Whether a star has planetary companions or not is a condition of its birth. Those with a larger initial allotment of metals have an advantage over those without.

Man, the cutting edge of terrestrial life, has no rational alternative but to expand the environmental and resource base beyond Earth.

We are not going to stop here on planet Earth. We're going to move out to other planetary bodies.

Let me mention that not all sun-like stars host planets - perhaps about 30% of them are planet-builders. It's not so easy to form a planet!

Our greatest theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, recently declared that humans have no more than a hundred years to get off this planet to ensure the survival of our species. And when someone such as he does so, it is with an understanding not just of the science, but of both our tenuous place and our possibility in the universe.

In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet.