Everyone is an explorer. How could you possibly live your life looking at a door and not open it?
Robert BallardThe deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.
Robert BallardThe body is sort of a pain. It has to go to the bathroom. It has to be comfortable. But the spirit is indestructible. It can move at the speed of light.
Robert BallardThe fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight - previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life - has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.
Robert Ballard