“There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I — I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets — those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics.”

—  Richard Feynman

volume II; lecture 41, "The Flow of Wet Water"; section 41-6, "Couette flow"; p. 41-12
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

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Richard Feynman181
American theoretical physicist 1918–1988

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