Cosmos - Carl Sagan - The shores of the Cosmic ocean
“The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”
“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding …”
“I believe our future depends, powerfully, on how well we understand this Cosmos
in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. We’re about to begin a
journey through the Cosmos …it’s a story about us … how the Cosmos has shaped
our evolution and our culture and what our fate may be.”
“We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads; but to find the truth we need
imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be
careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The Cosmos is full beyond measure of
elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of
nature.”
“Some part of our being knows this is where we came from [the stars], we long to
return. And we can because the Cosmos is also within us; we are made of 'star stuff'
- we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”
the journey on spaceship ‘dandelion seed’
“No matter where we travel, the patterns of nature are the same.”
“The same laws of physics apply everywhere - throughout the Cosmos. But we have
just begun to understand these laws; the universe is rich in mystery.”
quasars
light year measure (distance; not time)
clusters of galaxies
the ‘local group’
Milky Way – “Home galaxy of the human species.”
“... we humans have evolved to consciousness and some measure of
understanding.”
400 billion suns in Milky Way
“Within this galaxy are stars, worlds, and, it may be, an enormous diversity of living
things, and intelligent beings, and space-faring civilizations.”
supernova remnants “... returning ‘star stuff’ back into space.”
“Pulsars keep such perfect time that the first one discovered was thought to be a
sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, perhaps a navigational beacon for great ships
that travel across the light years and between the stars.”
transcribed by Dr. Gary Locklair for Science 303 - Cosmogony
