UNDER CONSTRUCTION
“DO YOUR WORK WITH YOUR WHOLE HEEART, AND YOU WILL SUCCEED — THERE’S SO LITTLE COMPETITION.”
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
T. E. Lawrence
“If you think 20 years out and ask what’s the most important company on the planet, it is not any company you could write down today. The most important company 20 years from now has not even been founded yet and doesn’t have a name.”
Jurvetson
Brief
“Are you in earnest? Seize this very moment! Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Sometimes I think we’re alone in the Universe,
and sometimes I think we’re not.
In either case, the idea is quite staggering.”
Arthur Clark
“People who view industrialization as a source of the Earth’s troubles, its pollution, and the desecration of its surface, can only advocate that we give it up. This is something that we can’t do; we have the tiger by the tail. We have 4.5 billion people on Earth. We can’t support that many unless we’re industrialized and technologically advanced. So, the idea is not to get rid of industrialization but to move it somewhere else. If we can move it a few thousand miles into space, we still have it, but not on Earth. Earth can then become a world of parks, farms, and wilderness without giving up the benefits of industrialization.”
Isaac Asimov, speech at Rutgers University
“How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem I do not know; I hope, as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing, for ‘aiming at the stars’ both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.”
Robert H. Goddard
“The frontier in space, embodied in the space colony, is one in which the interactions between humans and their environment is so much more sensitive and interactive and less tolerant of irresponsibility than it is on the whole surface of the Earth. We are going to learn how to relate to the Earth and our own natural environment here by looking seriously at space colony ecologies.”
Astronaut Rusty Schweickart in L-5 News, 1977
“Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth: to bring the poverty-stricken segments of the world up to a decent living standard, without recourse to war or punitive action against those already in material comfort; to provide for a maturing civilization the basic energy vital to its survival.”
Gerard O’Neill, The High Frontier, 1976
“I believe it is urgent to begin now, before we are constrained by a totally controlled society monitoring limited resources on the planet. Now is the time to establish our extraterrestrial base in freedom; later it may be under the coercion of necessity.”
Barbara Marx Hubbard in L-5 News, 1977
“It may be argued that the exploration and the settlement of space is no more than a “technological fix” for problems that should be solved on a higher, more intellectual plane. Yet by our evolution we are closely tied to the material world: we are the descendants of the survivors, from many generations during which the maintenance of life was a struggle every day with the material world. Our history does not suggest that we are well-suited to changing, overnight, to a species disinterested in material well-being, with paramount concern for humanity as a whole rather than for a narrower group. Indeed, our loyalties are first to those few individuals to whom we are linked by close ties of genetic relationship; only with effort do we extend our concern to the town, the state, the nation, and the world. As a species, we have solved our problems by technical means for millennia, and it would be surprising indeed if we could change our character so completely as to abandon the methods by which we have survived.”
