“The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.”

— Carl Sagan

0 min 45 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue [Episode 2]
Context: All my life, I've wondered about life beyond the earth. On those countless other planets that we think circle other suns, is there also life? Might the beings of other worlds resemble us, or would they be astonishingly different? What would they be made of? In the vast Milky Way galaxy, how common is what we call life? The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.

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Carl Sagan 365

American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

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“The life we have on Earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to generate spontaneously elsewhere in the universe.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

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“Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that's on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth…There isn't one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth's life cycle…And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occuring in the earth.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

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2010s

““Is it a wicked thing, then?”
“I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. Death and life are the same thing—like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same… They can be neither separated, nor mixed.””

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 5, "Sea Dreams" (Arren and Ged)

“There’s always this question in every growing consciousness, what is the purpose of life and what are our roles in it. When you focus on this question for a while the answers somehow present itself to you, you’d realise that we are searching for something which we don’t know what it really is or where to actually get it.
At the end of the search you’d realise that everything you’re searching for is already within you and you’ve been searching for yourself. So it’s safe to say the purpose of life is self realisation and unfoldment.”

N3du

“The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67
Attributed from posthumous publications

“I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. (Chuckles) Did I say that? I guess I did.”

Sylvia Earle (1935) American oceanographer

Quote from her 2009 TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans

“Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization…”

Greg Bear book The Forge of God

Source: The Forge of God (1987), Chapter 52 (p. 352)

“There are two sides to every question.”

Protagoras (-486–-411 BC) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

As quoted in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius, Book IX, Sec. 51

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.”

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor

Source: Man's Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust

“True life is elsewhere”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

“The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.”

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Carl Sagan 365

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