Earth

"The whole of creation was called into existence by God unto His glory, and each creature has its own hymn of praise wherewith to extol the Creator. Heaven and earth, Paradise and hell, desert and field, rivers and seas--all have their own way of paying homage to God. The hymn of the earth is, "From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, glory to the Righteous.""

"The sea said to the earth, "Take thy children unto thyself," and the earth retorted, "Keep those whom thou hast slain." The sea hesitated to do as the earth bade, for fear that God would demand them back on the day of judgement; and the earth hesitated, because it remembered with terror the curse that had been pronounced upon it for having sucked up Abel's blood. Only after God swore and oath, not to punish it for receiving the corpses of the Egyptians, would the earth swallow them."

"Say: Do you indeed disbelieve in Him Who created the earth in two days, and do you set up equals with Him? That is the Lord of the worlds. And He made in it mountains above its surface, and He blessed therein and ordained therein its foods, in four days; alike for (all) seekers. Then He directed Himself to the heaven and it was a vapour, so He said to it and to the earth: Come both, willingly or unwillingly. They both said: We come willingly."

"I am destined to become a curse, and to be cursed through man, and if God Himself does not take the dust from me, no one else shall ever do it."

"I have not the strength, to provide food for the herd of Adam's descendants."

"I am 'without form and void,' and then too I shall soon 'wax old like a garment.' How then should I venture to appear before the King of kings? Nay, thy fate is like mine, for 'dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'"

"I have been young, and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken."

"The globe of the Earth stands supportless in space... Just as the [spherical] bulb of a Kadamba flower is covered all around by blossoms, just so is the globe of the Earth surrounded by all creatures, terrestrial as well as aquatic."

"The earth is the source and the being of the people animals and fooooooooooooooooooooooooooood we NEEEED FOOD, and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really a place, separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies; the witchery makes us believe that false idea. The earth is not a mere source of survival, distant from the creatures it nurtures and from the spirit that breathes in us, nor is it to be considered an inert resource on which we draw in order to keep our ideological self functioning, whether we perceive that self in sociological or personal terms. We must not conceive of the earth as an ever-dead other that supplies us with a sense of ego identity by virtue of our contrast to its perceived nonbeing."

"Yeah Earth I’m The Home To Every Boy & Girl."

"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be"

"The Earth is the Mother, I am her Son."

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

"The earth was made so various, that the mind Of desultory man, studious of change And pleased with novelty, might be indulged."

"they witnessed the start of an era of unprecedented global consumption of living resources, the transformation of an earthly paradise 4.6 billion years in the making skimmed for the short-term service of a single insatiable species."

"This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom, — the very fashion of which "passeth away.""

"Облетев Землю в корабле-спутнике, я увидел, как прекрасна наша планета. Люди, будем хранить и преумножать эту красоту, а не разрушать её!"

"The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed."

"In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies — even our dreams."

"Times are tough, but never forget the awe and majesty of life on this strange blue planet."

"What have we done to the world, look what we've done What about all the peace that that you pledge your only son? What about flowering fields, is there a time? What about all the dreams that you said were yours and mine? Did you ever stop to notice all the children dead from war? Did you ever stop to notice the crying Earth, the weeping shores?"

"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond."

"Until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."

"No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?"

"I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our Nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced... Immigration, which even the war has not stopped, will land upon our shores hundred of thousands more per year from overcrowded Europe. I intend to point them to the gold and silver that waits for them in the West. Tell the miners from me, that I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my ability; because their prosperity is the prosperity of the Nation, and we shall prove in a very few years that we are indeed the treasury of the world."

"To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold--brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

"If we imagined that from now on, animals started emitting a red light every time they suffered, then from space, Earth would no longer be a blue planet, but a red and glowing one."

"The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!"

"I want people to look at the world and see what’s happening to it and take some action. This planet is so lovable. It is so various and so lovable, including all sorts of parts of the world that I’ve never seen, and I’ve seen more than most people. Just in what your eyes see, and how people live on the earth, it’s amazing, but it’s going to end if we don’t get our leaders to pay attention."

"And We have certainly established you (mankind) upon the earth and made for you therein ways of livelihood. Little are you grateful."

"He said: Go forth -- some of you, the enemies of others. And there is for you in the earth an abode and a provision for a time. He said: Therein shall you live, and therein shall you die, and there from shall you be raised."

"And the earth - We spread it out and cast therein firmly set mountains and made grow therein (something) of every beautiful kind, Giving insight and a reminder for every servant who turns (to Allah)."

"And on the earth are signs for the certain (in faith) and in yourselves. Then will you not see?"

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

"The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting."

"We’ve done such a rotten job managing our own planet, we should be very careful before trying to manage others."

"Earth below us drifting, falling. Floating weightless calling, calling home..."

"The earth, that's nature's mother, is her tomb."

"For naught so vile that on the earth doth live, But to the earth some special good doth give."

"We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."

"Simonson, in rubber jacket and similar galoshes, bound with whip-cord over woolen socks (he was a vegetarian and did not use the skin of animals), was also awaiting the departure of the party. He stood near the entrance of the house, writing down in a note-book a thought that occurred to him. “If,” he wrote, “a bacterium were to observe and analyze the nail of a man, it would declare him an inorganic being. Similarly, from an observation of the earth’s surface, we declare it to be inorganic. That is wrong.”"

"We are pilgrims, not settlers; this earth is our inn, not our home."

"The crucified planet Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, "Forgive them, Father, They know not what they do."The irony would be that we know what we are doing.When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here."

"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."

"As we give thanks for the Earth, will we live in such a way that the Earth can be grateful for us?"

"The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions."

"The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them."

"In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection."

"And again, observe ye the days of summer how the sun is above the earth over against it. And you seek shade and shelter by reason of the heat of the sun, and the earth also burns with growing heat, and so you cannot tread on the earth, or on a rock by reason of its heat."

"But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace."

"For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind."

"Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all. Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, That thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldest know the paths to the house thereof?"

"And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation."

"Hope in Jehovah and follow his way,"

"They will not cause any harm Or any ruin in all my holy mountain, Because the earth will certainly be filled with the knowledge of Jehovah As the waters cover the sea."

"He is a lover of righteousness and justice. With the loving-kindness of Jehovah the earth is filled."

"But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time came for the dead to be judged and to reward your slaves the prophets and the holy ones and those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth."

"We really are approaching the end of the era of expanding man. ...Man has always had somewhere to go... somewhere to beckon him as a virgin land of promise. ...The photographs of the earth by astronauts in lunar orbit symbolize the end of this era. ...[T]he earth is a beautiful little spaceship, all blue and green and white, with baroque cloud patterns... and its destination is unknown. It is getting pretty crowded and its resources rather limited. The problem of the present age is that of the transition from the Great Plains into the spaceship or what Barbara Ward and I have been calling spaceship earth. ...[W]e must develop a cyclical economy within which man can maintain an agreeable state. ...[T]he idea of the GNP simply falls apart. ...This is a fundamental change in human consciousness, and it will require an adjustment of our ethical, religious, and national systems which may be quite traumatic. ...If the whole world developed to American standards overnight, we would run out of everything in 100 years. Economic development... will result in final catastrophe unless we treat this interval in the history of man as an opportunity to make the transition to spaceship earth. ...We will have to aim for much lower levels of growth, because the cyclical process costs more than the throughput does. ...The idea that we are moving into a world of absolutely secure and effortless abundance is nonsense."

"The ethic of of the land is not yet part of the national consciousness. People are coming to it only gradually. They have yet to be convinced that we're on the Spaceship Earth, and it's all we have."

"The metaphor of ‘Spaceship Earth’ employed by a diverse array of scientists, economists and politicians during the 1960s and 1970s points to the Cold War origins of the first global environmentalist movement. With the advent of Spaceship Earth, nature itself became at once technological artifact and a vital object of Cold War gamesmanship. The evolution of this metaphor uncovers the connections between Cold War technologies such as nuclear weapons, space travel and cybernetics, and the birth of the first global environmentalist movement. Revisiting Spaceship Earth may help us to better understand the implicit assumptions that have both empowered and limited that movement."

"Young people are always asking what it's like to be on a spaceship... Well, what does it feel like? Because that's what you're on. The Earth is a very small spaceship hurtling through space. ...This spaceship is so superbly designed that we've had men on board here for about two million years reproducing themselves, thanks to the ecological balance ...all the vegetation is breathing up [out] all the gases needed by the mammals and all the mammals are giving off all the gases needed by the vegetation ..."

"It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!""

"Until recently, economists have not been particularly carried away with concern over environmental problems caused by industrial development. ...[T]he few economists ...who have always sounded the alarm ...are somewhat out of the mainstream. These humanist concerns seem to have gone out of style after the age of classical economics. Even the conventional analytical models of contemporary economics seem to prefer to exclude these concepts by ignoring them entirely or by shunting them off into their own branch, called "economic externalities." ...In recent years concern over these ...externalities has grown. The environmentalists are beginning to be included in the mainstream. ...Attempts are even being made to extend the theoretical framework to include the changes in the environment caused by economic activity... The Materials Flow of the Economy... sees the human race living on a 'space ship earth' in which all the inputs and outputs, all the original resources and all the final wastes, must be accounted for. ...[W]hen the materials are returned in the form of smoke, sewage, garbage, junk, heat, noise, and a wide variety of noxious gases... the change is seldom for the better. ...[T]he less production that is needed to maintain an adequate level of affluence, the better. An efficient economy is one that gets big results with little effort. More industries, more mines, more businesses, more employment, and more consumer goods do not always mean more well-being... because all these also mean more destruction of our natural resources and despoilation of our surroundings."

"Spaceship Earth not only illustrated but also created a fundamental shift in the conception of life and living space on the earth that brought about new regimes and visions of efficiency. Spaceship Earth signified the threat to earth as a natural habitat, but it also created expectations for science and technology to provide a 'blueprint for survival', substituting the of the earth with possible surrogate spaces elsewhere. ...[T]he singular historical constellation around... 1970... may be characterized by the intersection of the aspirations of space flight, rising environmental concerns, Cold War conflicts, the consciousness of a new global interdependence, and... the hitherto unprecedented potential for intervention—and destruction—by scientific and technological means. ...New in the 1960s were not the environmental concerns but the optimistic ideas of being able to turn the dismal fate of the planet into a bright future planned by scientists and engineers. ...[U]p to the late 80s ...Spaceship Earth did not simply serve as a metaphor to express the fragility of the planet; rather... a range of aspects associated with the constraint and crowdedness of the earth. Spaceship Earth became the central part of a mythology to present the problems of planetary closure meaningfully and to propose strategies and solutions of escape."

"What is man? As Homo sapiens he experiences the ecological crisis with all the rest of Spaceship Earth: but as imago Dei he alone knows it, writes books and laws about it, and is able to pray for as well as prey on his fellow creatures. ...Co-author H. Paul Santmire devotes the second half of the volume to an impassioned plea for the reorientation in human values at this critical juncture in man's ecological life. The issue, he contends, is... the survival of humanity. ...Thinking ecologically ...calls for a restructuring of our entire way of life. ...Immediate remedies include the stabalization and reduction of population growth, a radical cut-back in the non-essentials of economic growth, massive programs for recycling and pollution control, the substitution of cooperation for competition as the prevailing ethos of community life, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth. ...Chaplain Santmire calls for the acceptance of a universal good to serve as the valuational fuel for the moral inhabitants of Spaceship Earth."

"Bucky's phrase "Spaceship Earth" captured the imagination not only of those young graduates but also the imagination of the world. People use it commonly today. More importantly, our view of the earth, our planning and direction for the future, and our understanding of the universe have all been influenced significantly by this use of Bucky's concept."

"The lives of 3½ billion astronauts on board Spaceship Earth are just about as much in peril today as were the men aboard Apollo 13 in 1970. However, the pervasive irony of this analogy is that we... have nowhere else to go... We must begin to treat our spaceship within this context. ...Proper and moderate use of our mineral resources is necessary. Maintaining the correct atmospheric mixture of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen is critical. Renewable resources such as minerals, gases, and water must be returned to their cycles in a reusable form. Solid wastes on board... must be efficiently disposed of... in a form that can be degraded by decomposer organisms so that such materials will not accumulate. ...In short, the environment of the spacecraft must be kept orderly, balanced, and efficient. ...[P]otentially, overpopulation is more dangerous than a malfunctioning of... life-support systems... We can restore the craft's environment only if we fully understand not only its processes, causes, and effects, but also all the ramifications of our attempts at restoration... [and] the physical inner-workings of the entire system. ...[T]he current environmental crisis can ultimately be alleviated only by a massive shift in our individual and corporate lifestyles. ...Drastic changes in our economic, sociological, political, moral, ecological, and religious practices and beliefs must occur ...to live in relative harmony... to change our style of living... to that of a spaceman... being, acting, thinking, living, and responding like an astronaut on board Spaceship Earth."

"The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system."

"It was during one of the Apollo flights that... ... exclaimed, "the earth from here is a grand oasis in the great vastness of space." From these words and from pictures showing a tiny marbled sphere developed the popular metaphor—spaceship earth. Our tiny spaceship carries its own life support system: atmosphere for supporting respiration, vegetation for supporting life, and resources that can be transformed into goods and services. ...[W]e hope that studies of our past history (...as far as 5 billion years) as to the way... earth evolved... will help us in predicting our future course. ...We develop the broad concept of earth as an ecosphere (ecological system) and include... speculations pertaining to the long range future of earth as an inhabitable planet."

"We travel together, passengers on a spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."

"[A]t long last the concept of Earth Day, of world patriotism and of the family of man, have come into being. May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful space ship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life."

"In the last few decades, mankind has been overcome by the most fateful change in its entire history. Modern science and technology have created so close a network of communication, transport, economic interdependence—and potential nuclear destruction—that planet earth, on its journey through infinity, has acquired the intimacy, the fellowship, and the vulnerability of a spaceship. In such a close community, there must be rules for survival. We have... a reasonable idea of... the rules... since we live by them inside our own domestic society. We abandon the "right" to settle... disputes by force and violence and hand them over to... impartial... courts of law. And... we expect... through the concept of "general welfare"—that misery, grievance, and injustice do not drive us to violence. ...These ...are what we have to seek in the world at large. ...The gaps in wealth [and] ideology ...make up the abyss into which mankind can fall to annihilation. It is on these disproportions that world policy has to concentrate... a reasonable balance of power... wealth... between the planet's developed... and underdeveloped... a reasonable balance of understanding and tolerance between... creeds. Then... there can be... hope of building the common institutions, policies, and beliefs which the crew of Spaceship Earth must acquire... to have... hope of survival."

"Hugh Downs: We have harnessed the power of the atom. We have reached the moon. And yet we do not seem to understand our place on earth and the natural laws that govern us. It is in the understanding of these laws, and action in concord with them, that our salvation lies: the salvation of the earth and our own salvation. There is still time. Raymond Burr: Hopeful times are beginning to appear on the international horizon. The recent agreements signed between the United States and the Soviet Union on mutual environmental problems is a large step forward. Only through international cooperation can we hope to correct the crisis facing all mankind. Hugh Downs: Man inhabits two worlds, the natural one that preceded us by billions of years, and the world we have built from our technology using our machines and science to create an environment obedient to our purpose and directions. And now, as we reach the last stages of the twentieth century, there is a spreading sense of awareness that something fundamental and irrevocable is happening to man's relations between both his worlds. Our new knowledge of planetary interdependence demands a reshaping of our individual loyalty. We must develop a sense of planetary community and commitment. We must make our earth a center of rational loyalty for all mankind. Nationalistic loyalties must become secondary to our allegiance to earth. We can only hope to survive in all our prized diversity by achieving an ultimate loyalty and devotion to our single, beautiful, vulnerable planet, the earth. Alone in its life-supporting systems, powered by inconceivable energies mediated for us through the most delicate adjustments. Is this not a precious home for all us earthlings? Is it not worthy of our love? Does it not deserve all the courage and care of which we are capable, to preserve it from degradation and destruction? Now for the first time in the history of man an international movement is underway. The people of the nations, and the nations of the world, have joined together to find the answers. ...[T]he world's representatives hold the solution. We have seen what we've done to bring about the destruction of our earth. Is it not the time now now to cure the disease that we ourselves have created? The answer is in our own hands. In your hands. Don't let this moment in time pass, or we may never have another, not in our lifetime, not in anyone's lifetime."

"Systems may be open or closed in respect to a number of inputs and outputs. Three important classes are matter, energy, and information. The present world economy is open to all three. We can think of the world economy or "econosphere" as a subset of the "world set," ...the set of all objects, people, organizations [etc.] This total stock of capital is... an open system... it has inputs... being production which adds to the capital stock, [and] outputs being consumption which subtracts from it. ...[W]e see objects passing from the noneconomic into the economic in... production, and... products passing out of the economic set as their [monetary] value becomes zero. Thus we see the econosphere as a material process involving the discovery and mining of fossil fuels, ores, etc., and at the other end... effluents... are passed out into noneconomic reservoirs—[e.g.,] the atmosphere and the oceans—which... do not enter into the exchange system."

"[T]he econosphere involves inputs of... energy... In advance societies this is supplemented very extensively by the use of fossil fuels, which represent... a capital stock of stored-up sunshine. ...This supplementary input ...is by its very nature exhaustible."

"We can think of the stock of knowledge, or as Teilhard de Chardin called it, the "noosphere," and consider this as an open system, losing knowledge through aging and death and gaining it through birth and education and the ordinary experience of life. ...A machine ...originated in the mind of man, and both its construction and... use involve information processes imposed... by man... The cumulation of knowledge... is the key to human development... especially economic development. ...[W]here the material capital has been destroyed by war, as in Japan and Germany... knowledge was not destroyed, and it did not take long... for most of the material capital to be reestablished..."

"One of the great puzzles... is why the take-off into science... an "acceleration," in the... growth in knowledge in European society in the sixteenth century, did not take place in China, which... was ahead of Europe... Perhaps the most significant factor... is the existence of "slack" in... culture, which permits a divergence from established patterns and activity... not merely devoted to reproducing the existing society but... to changing it."

"I am tempted to call the open economy the "cowboy economy," ...symbolic of the illimitable plains and... reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior... characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might... be called the "spaceman" economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system..."

"In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as... good... and production likewise; and... success is measured by the amount of throughput... If there are infinite reservoirs from which material can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited... throughput is... a plausible measure of... success... The gross national product is a rough measure of... total throughput."

"It should be possible... to distinguish that part of the GNP... derived from exhaustible and that... derived from reproducible resources, as well as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down the GNP in this way..."

"[I]n the spaceman economy... any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput ([i.e.,] less production and consumption) is... a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad... is very strange to economists..."

"It is always... hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, "What has posterity ever done for me?" ...[A] society which loses its identity with posterity and ...its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with the present problems, and soon falls apart."

"[T]omorrow is not only very close, but in many respects it is already here. The shadow of the future spaceship... is already falling over our spendthrift merriment. ...[T]he fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity... on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society... [O]ne... cannot view with equanimity the present rate of pollution... atmosphere... lakes... oceans."

"We are all familiar... with the wastes... in planned obsolescence... competitive advertising... poor quality of consumer goods. ...[N]o serious attempt has been made to assess the impact ...of changes in durability ...[W]e have underestimated ...the gains from increased durability ...one of the places where the price system needs correction through government-sponsored research and development."

"The problems which spaceship earth is going to present... are not all in the future... Many of the immediate problems of pollution of the atmosphere or of bodies of water arise because of the failure of the price system, and many... could be solved by corrective taxation. If people had to pay the losses due to the nuisances they create, a good deal more resources would go into... prevention..."

"The law of torts... is inadequate to provide for correction of the price system... There needs, therefore, to be special legislation to cover these cases... If we were to adopt in principle a law for tax penalties for social damages, with an apparatus for making assessments... a very large portion of current pollution and deterioration of the environment would be prevented."

"[W]e are endowed with ...intuitive and intellectual capabilities as ...discovering the genes and the R.N.A and D.N.A. and other fundamental principles governing ...life systems as well as of nuclear energy and chemical structuring as part of the ...design of the Spaceship Earth ...It is ...paradoxical ...that ...we have been mis-using, abusing, and polluting this ...system for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship. ...We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total."

"[W]e can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions. ...Thereafter , our "main engine," the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from ...wind, tide, water, and direct Sun radiation energy. The fossil-fuel savings account... for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built... to be sustained exclusively on our Sun's radiation's and Moon pull gravity's tidal, wind, and rainfall generated pulsating and therefore harnessable energies. The daily income energies are excessively adequate for the operation of our main industrial engines and their... productions. The energy expended in one minute of tropical hurricane equals the combined energy of all the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. nuclear weapons."

"... It was impossible, on first witnessing an appearance so similar to a sudden conflagration, not to expect a considerable result in the way of alteration of the details of the group in which it occurred; and I was certainly surprised, on referring to the sketch which I had carefully and satisfactorliy (and I may add fortunately) finished before the ocurrence, at finding myself unable to recognise any change whatever as having taken place. The impression left upon me is, that the phenomenon took place at an elevation considerably above and over the great group in which it was seen projected."

"Without warning, two beads of searing white light, bright as forked lightning but rounded rather than jagged and persistent instead of fleeting, appeared over the monstrous sunspot group. Momentarily taken by surprise, Carrington assumed that a ray of sunlight had found its way through the shadow-screen attached to the telescope. He reached out and jiggled the instrument, expecting the errant ray to zip wildly across the image. Instead, it stayed doggedly fixed in its position on the sunspot group. Whatever it was, it was not some stray reflection; it was coming from the Sun itself. As he stared, dumfounded, the two spots of light intensified and became kidney shaped."

"... In the case of the Carrington event of 1859, the most severe coronal mass ejection known to have occurred, the propagation time between the Sun and the Earth, at a speed of 2,300 kilometres per second, was seventeen and a half hours. The way to avert the most serious impacts would be to make adjustments to the operation of the electricity grids before the storm struck (see Space Studies Board 2008, Chapter 7). The necessary actions would have to be taken very quickly and in a coordinated way in order to be effective, so they would have to be carefully planned in advance, preferably in an international context."

"In making his own calculation, however, Christopher Columbus preferred the values given by the medieval Persian geographer, Alfraganus: one degree (at the equator) is equal to 56.67 miles. That was Columbus’s first error, which he compounded with a second: he assumed that the Persian was using the 4 856-foot Roman mile; in fact, Alfraganus meant the 7 091-foot Arabic mile.Taken together, the two miscalculations effectively reduced the planetary waistline to 16,305 nautical miles, down from the actual 21,600 or so, an error of 25 percent."

"You climb a mountain situated close to the sea or a level plain, and then observe the setting of the sun and find out the dip of the horizon... [Then] find the value of the perpendicular of the mountain. You multiply this height into the sine of the complementary angle of the dip, and divide the total by the versed sine of this dip itself. Then multiply (twice) the quotient into 22 and divide the result by 7. You will get the... earth's circumference (in the same units) in which the height of the mountain has been found."