Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

Ramez Naam

I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.

Agnes Smedley

I've sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I've helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

Alan Alda

When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.

Alan Stern

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

Amos Oz

I used to sail a lot in all kinds of weather, competing on small sailboats in the ocean. And I travel a lot in Iceland on horses every summer, through the wild areas where there's no inhabitants and there are volcanoes.

Baltasar Kormakur

There's always an excitement around the Strip whenever something new being built. It was always the biggest and the best hotel or, you know, over-the-top things. And so, family would be coming in from out of town, and it was such a thrill to be showing them this, you know, erupting new volcano or whatever it was.

Brandon Flowers

There will be no funeral! Before I get too old and ill, I'll go to South America and live among the Pemon people and meditate. When the time is right, they can throw my body into the volcano.

Brian Blessed

I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn't really begun yet - or perhaps it's already over. There's something in the landscape that's stronger than human civilisation. There's no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.

Claire Denis

The reason you see so many volcanoes on Venus is partly due to the fact that there's virtually no erosion there. So on Venus, you're seeing features, some of which are hundreds of millions of years old on the surface. On Earth, we do not see any surface features nearly that old - you only see much more recent features.

David Grinspoon

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

Elon Musk

A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.

Fisher Ames

We typically sell a catheter lab to a hospital, and it sits there for the next 10 years, and we don't visit the cardiologist on a daily basis. Volcano have a disposable business. They are in the cath lab on a daily basis.

Frans van Houten

The agreement to acquire Volcano significantly advances our strategy to become the leading systems integrator in image-guided therapies.

Frans van Houten

I was, like, a kooky kid, so people thought I was loud, but I really wasn't. I was kind of loud in outbursts. I was like a silent volcano. When I did have something to share, it was very over-the-top. But I've learned to balance that.

Grace Potter

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Havelock Ellis

I can remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a Cabinet meeting and told the members: 'You are all a bunch of burned-out volcanoes;' and asked for their resignations.

Helen Thomas

Mauna Kea from Hilo has a shapely aspect, for its top is broken into peaks, said to be the craters of extinct volcanoes, but my eyes seek the dome-like curve of Mauna Loa with far deeper interest, for it is as yet an unfinished mountain.

Isabella Bird

We danced on the lip of the volcano, so to speak. We were young, too. And New York was still a big, open city where anything could happen and anyone could be star. Rents were cheap, creativity was encouraged, and bottle service was still 20 years away. That was the era the Club Kids came into.

James St. James