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On the Planet Mars. I remember being transfixed by the first lander image to show the horizon of Mars. This was not an alien world, I thought. I knew places like it in Colorado and Arizona and Nevada. There were rocks and sand drifts and a distant eminence, as natural and unselfconscious as any landscape on earth. Mars was a place. I would, of course, have been surprised to see a grizzled prospector emerge from behind a dune leading his mule, but at the same time the idea seemed appropriate. Nothing remotely like it ever entered my mind in all the hours I spent examining the [Soviet] Venera 9 and 10 images of the Venus surface. One way or another, I knew, this was a world to which we would return.
On Black Holes. [They] are beasts akin to the smile on the Cheshire Cat. They are enormous stars that have winked out, but are still there, peppering the galaxy like the holes in an Emmenthaler cheese.
On Extraterrestrial Life. There is an old story about the Biology I examination in which the students were asked: "Suppose you could take to Mars any of the laboratory equipment used in this course. How would you determine if there were life on Mars?" One famous response: "Ask the inhabitants. Even a negative answer would be significant." The student got an A.
On the Significance of Man. As long as there have been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.