Robert Ballard Ocean Quotations

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing.

Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls.

Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best friend.

The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.

My final question: Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build a habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonizing the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet, and the technology is at hand!

The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight-previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life-has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.

Fifty percent of the United States of America is underneath the ocean. And we have better maps of Mars than those areas.

NASA's annual budget for space exploration could fund NOAA's budget for ocean exploration for 1600 years.

Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?