By the time I'm 40, interplanetary travel will be common. Nobody will want to talk to me at that age, anyway.
Ace Frehley
I have my hopes, & very distinct ones, too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations: in short, a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of the brain (equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary & sideral world).
Ada Lovelace
Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.
Al Gore
The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out to Neptune's orbit.
Alan Stern
As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.
New Horizons isn't just visiting Pluto; it's visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration - the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.
We really just didn't realize the diversity of planetary types in our solar system. Pluto looked like a misfit because it was the only one we saw. And just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. They're large enough to make themselves round by self gravity, and they surely pass the test of planethood.
I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.
The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.
No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things.
If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.
I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
My field is called planetary science.
I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.
To say that what a planet is doesn't matter would be to imply that a planetary scientist couldn't explain to someone what the field is about.
In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies... many members of the public assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.
We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.
Why would you need to expand beyond the solar system if you already have access to all the information you need, and you've essentially insulated yourself against a planetary apocalypse? Maybe that's enough.
Alastair Reynolds
We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.
Alex Steffen
In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.
Alice Morse Earle
In the future we're going to have interplanetary, we're going to have two planets that human beings are living on.
As digital communications have multiplied, and NSA capabilities with them, the agency has shifted resources from surveillance of individual targets to the acquisition of communications on a planetary scale.
You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.
Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.
Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What's that have to do with space exploration? If we were moving outward from there, and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it's turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration.
The Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight, and obviously splendour beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach... just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies.
Most of the solar system resides beyond the orbits of the asteroids. There is more to learn there about general planetary processes than on Mars.
In any 'big science' enterprise, like planetary exploration, where you must work in big teams of similarly driven people, it is important also to know how to work alongside others even when they may be your fiercest competitors.
I know that I derive the same kind of spiritual fulfillment from what I do, being a planetary scientist, seeing our exploration of the solar system come to fruition. I get such a spiritual high from it that I don't even see the need for religion.
As a planetary system, Saturn holds the greatest promise for answering questions that have a far broader scientific reach than Saturn itself.
When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years.
It would be impossible in a few words to describe all that we've found with Cassini. No mission has ever gone as deep for as long on a planetary system as rich as Saturn's.
NASA, and all the other spacefaring nations of the world, have agreed to a set of 'planetary-protection' principles, aimed at preventing the accidental contamination of another habitable world with organisms from Earth.
Earth's biosphere gave birth to humans and our thoughts, which are now reshaping its planetary cycles. A planet with brains? Fancy that.
I do a lot of work with NASA and am involved in research projects studying planetary evolution, Earth-like planets, and potential conditions for life elsewhere.
Ever since the environmental movement was sparked by photos of the whole Earth taken by astronauts onboard Apollo Lunar Modules, I've seen planetary exploration as an extension of a reverence and care for Earth.
I'm an astrobiologist, and I come from a planetary science background, so in a very broad sense, I study the evolution of planetary environments.
I do comparative studies of climate evolution, and the interactions between planetary atmosphere and surfaces and their radiation environment, and try to understand the environmental factors that can affect a planet's habitability and how they change over time.
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.
You cannot study other planets without referring to Earth and without applying the techniques and the insights of Earth science. And you cannot really do a good job understanding the Earth without the insights from planetary exploration.
I think that an advanced planetary civilization will modify their own planets to be more stable, to prevent asteroid impacts and dangerous climate fluctuations.
I intend to apply the perspective of astrobiology, which is a deep-time way of looking at life on Earth, towards the question of the Anthropocene. What does the human phenomenon on Earth look like viewed from an interplanetary perspective?
One of the first thoughts I had, when doing early exoplanet research, was that Earth and its many companions seemed very different from the planetary systems we were detecting.
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.
As our sensitivity improves, we are finally seeing planets with longer orbital periods, planetary systems that look more like our solar system.
There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one's nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence.
The work of mathematicians on 'pure' problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.
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.
If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.
Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.
