Mars and my own stupidity keep trying to kill me.
~ Andy Weir
NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars! Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!
~ Charles Stross
Pushing the boundaries and uniting the world: That’s what Mars One is about.
~ Nico Marquardt
Mars One has the power to show people around the globe what is possible if we just all work on one goal. No human has left Earth’s orbit since 1972 and no one ever ploughed beyond the moon into deep space. It’s finally time to inspire the world and make the next giant leap for mankind.
I stumbled up the hill back toward the Hab. As I crested the rise, I saw something that made me very happy and something that made me very sad: The Hab was intact (yay!) and the MAV was gone (boo!).
No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.
~ Mary Roach
But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try - Ransom has tried a hundred times - to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender.
~ C.s. Lewis
Io, this is Admiral Muhan of the Martian Congressional Republic Navy. You fire anything bigger than a bottle rocket and we will glass the whole fucking moon. Do you read me?
~ James S.a. Corey
People seem weak, but they're strong. They seem strong, but they're weak.
~ Fuyumi Soryo
On Mars, the joke went, a man’s hole was his castle where values of castle approached dorm room.
Mars is not Earth. It doesn't have a thick atmosphere to bend light and carry particles that reflect light around corners. It's damn near a vacuum here. Once the sun isn't visible, I'm in the dark. Phobos gives me some moonlight, but not enough to work with. Deimos is a little piece of crap that's no good to anyone.
I don't fight without reason. I don't want war without end.
~ Rick Riordan
The one that will put the first human colony on another planet is certainly the most important human on Earth. And you can judge the rest of mankind of his time by how they judge him along the way.
~ Robin Sacredfire
There's always someone who cares. Someone whose life would simply stop. You just don't know it yet, or you haven't found them yet.
Sometime I wish if I were from Mars, because no one loves me here.
~ M.f. Moonzajer
As the leaves randomly fell, she contemplated how they sacrificially gave up their essence to sustain new life. Or was it the tree’s sacrifice? Each leaf was a part of Gaia’s play. Their final act: to decompose so a new level of soil could be made, an earthen writing tablet for the next layer of history to be recorded. One generation became the groundwork for the next. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Nothing was exempt, not even the leaves.
~ Jesikah Sundin
Secrets upon secrets were weaving into a strange and mysterious fabric that would ultimately clothe his future.
Their leafy whispers delighted her, and she promised her confidentiality by gently touching the trunks of both trees. They had held her secrets close to their hearts, she could do no less.
Multi-colored lights flashed and glared on the wet road and cast eerie reflections, reminiscent of artistic surrealism. Fillion imagined that his distress and anger swirled and moved with the refracted lights, creating an urban masterpiece of demented fury.
The scenic route was a paved graveyard of dreams, but Fillion hoped his would rise from the ashes, marking the moment when he would finally own his life.
Leaf felt buried beneath the remains of their prior life, the ashes coating every part of who he thought he was in this community.
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
~ Herbert V. Prochnow
People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.
~ Jeff Bezos
I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
~ Elon Musk
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.
The space program needs a goal, and the goal should be humans to Mars.
~ Robert Zubrin
If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.
~ Neil Degrasse Tyson
Space architectures capable of supporting a permanent human presence on Mars are extraordinarily complex, with many different interdependent systems.
~ Buzz Aldrin
We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.
~ Ellen Stofan
Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap.
~ Henry Spencer
Am I willing to go to Mars? Yes, but I'm not willing to spend nine months getting there, then wait 18 more months until the planets align to come home.
~ Eugene Cernan
The most challenging roles were Disney's 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Mars Needs Moms' because they were both motion capture, so there was a lot of physical work involved.
~ Raymond Ochoa
You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar inspected, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked, and even laser blasted.
We could have human intelligence in orbit around Mars, building things there.
If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
~ Noam Chomsky
'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
~ Junot Díaz
The first footfalls on Mars will mark a historic milestone, an enterprise that requires human tenacity matched with technology to anchor ourselves on another world.
Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there's very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can't.
I think there would be no shortage of applicants to the government astronaut corps to be settlers on the planet Mars. And I think this would be very inspiring.
