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Steven Soter Quotes

Total quotes: 21
“The age and size of the cosmos are written in light. The nature of beauty and the substance of the stars, the laws of space and time they were there all along, but we never saw them until we devised a more powerful way of seeing.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Hiding in the Light
Tagged: Cosmos, Nature, beauty, space and time
“Nothing lasts forever; even the stars die.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Sisters of the Sun
Tagged: Death, Eternity, ephemeral, Stars
“Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Some of the Things That Molecules Do
Tagged: Science, Frontier, Knowledge, Ignorance, Shame
“Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity, and forward to the stars.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way
Tagged: Science, Passing the Torch, Antiquity, Community of Minds, Generations
“Why is Venus scorching hot? It's because…the flow of energy is blocked by a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide….Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: The World Set Free
Tagged: Venus, carbon dioxide, Greenhouse Effect
“Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts.”
— Ann Druyan, Steven Soter, Cosmos, Season 1: A Sky Full of Ghosts
Tagged: Stars, Earth, Ghosts, Light Years
“The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Some of the Things That Molecules Do
Tagged: Evolution, gravity, Kinship, Spiritual
“By burning coal, oil and gas, our civilization is exhaling carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can absorb it. So, CO2 is building up in the atmosphere. The planet is heating up.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: The World Set Free
Tagged: oil, coal, Gas, carbon dioxide, CO2, Global Warming
“If life has a sanctuary, it's here in the nucleus, which contains our DNA—the ancient scripture of our genetic code. And it's written in a language that all life can read.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Some of the Things That Molecules Do
Tagged: Nucleus, DNA, Life
“There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies in the known universe.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still
Tagged: Atoms, Eye, Stars, galaxies, Universe
“Many of us suspect that all of this—all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe—is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes; a multiverse. Universe upon universe; worlds without end.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way
Tagged: Astronomy, galaxies, Stars, Universe
“I could be thousands of miles away, and yet, when you turn on whatever device is bringing my image and voice to you, I'm there. Instantaneously. How is that possible?....It all began in the mind of one person….This is the story of how we learned to make electrons do our bidding.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: The Electric Boy
Tagged: Electrons, Digital Communication, Michael Faraday
“For thousands of generations we watched the stars as if our lives depended on it, because they did….[O]ur ancestors noticed that the motions of the stars across the nights of the year foretold changes on Earth that threatened or enhanced our chances for survival.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Sisters of the Sun
Tagged: Generations, Ancestors, Earth
“There are many kinds of stars. Some are bright like the Sun. Some are dim. The greatest stars are ten million times larger than the smallest ones. Some stars are old beyond imagining, more than ten billion years of age. Others are being born right now. When atoms fuse in the hearts of stars, they make starlight. Stars are born in litters, formed from the gas and dust of interstellar clouds.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Sisters of the Sun
Tagged: Stars, Sun, Atoms, Clouds
“Two-thirds of the Earth lies beneath more than 1,000 feet of water. It's a vast and largely unexplored frontier....This is the longest submarine mountain range in the world, the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge. It wraps around our globe like the seam on a baseball. The past is another planet, but most of us don't really know this one.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth
Tagged: Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge, Frontier, Earth, Ocean
“The essential message of life has been copied and recopied for more than 3 billion years. But where did that message come from? Nobody knows. Perhaps it began in a shallow, sunlit pool, just like this….Or life could've started in the searing heat of a volcanic vent on the deep sea floor. Or is it possible that life came to Earth as a hitchhiker?”
— Ann Druyan, Steven Soter, Cosmos, Season 1: The Immortals
Tagged: Life, Hitchhiker, Alien Life
“Congratulations. You're alive. There's an unbroken thread that stretches across more than three billion years that connects us to the first life that ever touched this world. Think of how tough, resourceful and lucky all of our countless ancestors must have been to survive long enough to pass on the message of life to the next and the next and the next generation, hundreds of millions of times before it came to us….Each of us is a runner in the longest and most dangerous relay race there ever was, and at this moment, we hold the baton in our hands.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth
Tagged: Congratulations, Resourceful, Survival, Ancestors
“Every star is a sun as big, as bright as our own. Just imagine how far away from us you'd have to move the Sun to make it appear as small and faint as a star. The light from the stars travels very fast, faster than anything, but not infinitely fast. It takes time for their light to reach us. For the nearest ones, it takes years. For others, centuries. Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts. We see their light, but their bodies perished long, long ago.”
— William Herschel, Cosmos, Season 1: A Sky Full of Ghosts
Tagged: Sun, Stars, Light Years, Earth
“Few animals larger than a hundred pounds survived the catastrophes of the late Cretaceous. The dust cloud brought night and cold to the surface for months. The dinosaurs froze and starved to death. But there were small creatures who took shelter in the Earth. And when they emerged they found that the monsters who had hunted and terrorized them were gone. The Earth was becoming the Planet of the Mammals. And the Earth continued its ceaseless changing.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth
Tagged: Cretaceous, Mammals, Earth
“There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale to push the cosmos apart….We call it ‘dark energy,’ but that name, like ‘dark matter,’ is merely a code word for our ignorance. It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: Unafraid of the Dark
Tagged: Universe, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, gravity, Cosmos
“Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now our home galaxy—the Milky Way—will merge with our neighboring galaxy—Andromeda…Any life on the worlds of that far off future…would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show; a dance of a half a trillion stars, to music first heard on one little world, by a man who had but one true friend.”
— Himself - Host, Cosmos, Season 1: When Knowledge Conquered Fear
Tagged: Sir Isaac Newton, Astronomers, Milky Way, Andromeda
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