All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.

I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures.

In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs.

The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.

No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.