“Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.”

Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.

Present annual world energy consumption is about equal to the annihilation energy of 4 tons of matter.

No one can deny the excitement of visiting another world.

The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars.

Hanks is a good man, and he produced the “John Adams” series as well. He does good work. But I’m more worried about a Tom Hanks when we’re at war against radical Islam than I am against a caricature like Sean Penn. He’s a completely marginalized soul.

This much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir.

Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside. Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects.

All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera.