“You know, for as much as we humans think we really have control over our planet, nature tends to remind us from time to time that we are just flyspecks in the vastness of space and energy.”
The Big Blast http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/09/29/the-big-blast/, wattsupwiththat.com, September 29, 2007.
2007
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Anthony Watts 40
American television meteorologist 1958Related quotes

A reminder to us flyspecks on an elephant's butt http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/05/07/a-reminder-to-us-flyspecks-on-an-elephants-butt/, wattsupwiththat.com, May 7, 2008.
2008
Public comment to the US Oceans Commission, 2004 http://www.oceancommission.gov/publicomment/novcomments/helvarg_comment.pdf.

"Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency" (February 1892)
Context: Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel. Men have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason; it has been expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old and new. We find it in the delightful myth of Antaeus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians and in many hints and statements of thinkers of the present time. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic — and this we know it is, for certain — then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it.”
Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 13 (p. 244)

“We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged.”
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean [Episode 1]
Context: We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.
Cited in: Bernhard Joseph Stern ed. Science and Society. p. 135
Source: The step to man, 1966, p.169.