Asteroids Quotations

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

I despise the Lottery. There's less chance of you becoming a millionaire than there is of getting hit on the head by a passing asteroid.

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

This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

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.

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

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

Why do they call it an asteroid when it's outside the hemisphere, but call it a haemorrhoid when it's on the outside of your ass?

An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not - and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. They're the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.

Happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations...

I've seen Australia and I've lived on an asteroid and I'd take the asteroid.

Richard Pilbrow's lighting can turn a coin into an asteroid and an idea into an apparition.

Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now [with climate change], yet we dither.

People have to take seriously the threat coming from asteroids and what it represents. As Chelyabinsk reminded us, we have to take asteroids as a serious scientific concern, as well as a concern for protection of mankind and survival of the planet. This is not some kook policy. It's the protection of the interests of every single individual life on this planet.

Mars is the symbolic and totally stimulating next objective that could so dominate the next century's exploration efforts. From Mars, the resources of all the asteroids will become readily available.

Mars could very well be a staging location for the resources of the asteroid belt. We have to learn how to get a payback somewhere, but it's beyond Mars that the real payoff will come from minerals.

Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

Luckily, there are some rocks left over from our earliest days, asteroids formed during our solar system's birth. Occasionally, some of them drop in on Earth, and when they do, they're called meteorites.

Caltech honored me -- they named an asteroid after me. There's only two of them up there with names. One of them is Walter Cronkite. The other is Tommy Lasorda.

...they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.