“I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not.”
Part IV: Personal and Philosophical Essays, Ch. 24 : "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil" (1972)
The Scientist As Rebel (2006)
Context: I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not. Mars is waterless, and the others are, for various reasons, basically inhospitable to man. It is generally considered that beyond the sun’s family of planets there is absolute emptiness extending for light-years until you come to another star. In fact, it is likely that the space around the solar system is populated by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich in water and the other chemicals essential to life.
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Freeman Dyson 90
theoretical physicist and mathematician 1923Related quotes

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Speech in New York City http://books.google.com/books?id=Bc7iAAAAMAAJ&q="Generally+young+men+are+regarded+as+radicals+This+is+a+popular+misconception+The+most+conservative+persons+I+ever+met+are+college+undergraduates"+"the+radicals"+"are+the+men+past+middle+life", (19 Nov 1905), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson 16:228
1900s

Yanni in Words. Miramax Books. Co-author David Rensin

as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996)
Context: Generally speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of string theory... Some of them were discovered first, but I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth. On planet earth, they were discovered in this order [general relativity, quantum field theory, superstrings, and supersymmetry]... But I don't believe, if there are many civilizations in the universe, that those four ideas were discovered in that order in each civilization.

“The economic function of space industrialization is to generate jobs on Earth, not in space.”
The Extraterrestrial Imperative (1978)

Source: 1860s, Second State of the Union address (1862)
“Infinite product spaces are the natural habitat of probability theory.”
Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter V, Conditional Probability, Stochastic Independence, p. 130