Top 30 Asteroid Quotes

I don’t want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We’d be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

If you were to stand on an asteroid in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter in our solar system, you might be able to see one or two asteroids in the sky, but they would be very far away and very, very small. So you wouldn’t have this ‘dodging through tons of rocks’ business you get in the movies.

Changing the asteroid’s velocity changes the time when the asteroid crosses Earth’s orbit. After all, just because it crosses Earth’s path doesn’t mean there is necessarily going to be a collision. It has to cross Earth’s path when the Earth is right there.

As you may know, I’m the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

In ‘Star Wars: Episode II,’ when Jango Fett is chasing Obi Wan Kenobi through an asteroid field, they needed a big asteroid to shatter into a million pieces, and I had to figure out how to do the fracturing, write the code, and show an artist how to use it.

When you look at the origins and evolution of life on Earth, it’s been severely affected by asteroid impacts through history.

There’s no accepted global policy on what to do about asteroid impacts.

It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything.

A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight.

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

Without Jupiter cleaning out the early solar system, the Earth would be pock-marked with meteor collisions. We would suffer from asteroid impacts every day. CNN studios would probably be a gigantic crater it if wasn’t for Jupiter.

It shouldn’t be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you’re watching a science fiction show like ‘Star Trek’ and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it’s a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.

Most people have already seen a cosmic collision. If you’ve seen a shooting star ever, you’ve seen a cosmic collision, because a shooting star is not a star. It’s a tiny dust or pea sized fragment of an asteroid or a comet hitting our atmosphere and burning up as it hits in, as it comes in.

The stars look the same from night to night. Nebulae and galaxies are dully immutable, maintaining the same overall appearance for thousands or millions of years. Indeed, only the sun, moon and planets – together with the occasional comet, asteroid or meteor – seem dynamic.

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid – one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence – hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.

Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.

The chances that your tombstone will read ‘Killed by Asteroid’ are about the same as they’d be for ‘Killed in Airplane Crash.’

An asteroid impact in the worst case scenario is a terrifying thing. It seems very uncontrollable: in popular culture, it’s often a metaphor for human powerlessness over the world.

Research into manned spaceflight is shifting from low-Earth orbit to destinations much further away, like Mars and the asteroid belt. But society will have to invent many new technologies before it can plausibly send people to those distances.

The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.

What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can’t possibly be enough.

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I’m writing horror. Horror’s my default setting. It’s also where I prefer to write.

Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane – it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.

We are involved in technology development for, you know, missions that we hope to plan that would take us to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

I think every time we send a spacecraft to an asteroid or comet, we learn more.

Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.

It’s much more likely that an asteroid will strike the Earth and annihilate life as we know it than AI will turn evil.

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it’s game over. It’s control-alt-delete for civilization.