If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe.

Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.

This is written in the elder days as the Earth rides close to the rim of eternity, edging nearer to the dying Sun, into which her two inner companions of the solar system have already plunged to a fiery death. The Twilight of the Gods is history; and our planet drifts on and on into that oblivion from which nothing escapes, to which time itself may be dedicated in the final cosmic reckoning.

Much of what we see in the universe ... starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.