You don't go to Gettysburg with a shovel, you don't take belt buckles off the Arizona.

What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

The 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.

Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet.

It's not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea.

The 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.