the way carl sagan writes about space is so, so incredibly beautiful

• the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the sping, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if of a distant memory, of falling from a height. we know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
• the surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. rom it we have learned most of what we know. recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. the water seems inviting. the ocean calls. some part of our being knows this is from where we came. we long to return. these aspirations are not, i think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be.
• no planet or star or galaxy can be typical, because the cosmos is mostly empty. the only typical place is within the vast, vold, universal vacuum, the everlasting night of intergalactic space, a place so strange and desolate that, by comparison, planets and stars and galaxies seem achingly rare and lovely.
• from an intergalatic vantage point we would see, strewn like sea froth on the waves of space, innumerable faint, wispy tendrils of light. these are the galaxies. some are solitary wanderers; most inhabit communal clusters, huddling together, drifting endlessly on the grandest scale we know. we are in the realm of the nebulae, eight billion light-years from earth, halfway to the edge of the known universe.
• a galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars -- billions upon billions of stars. every star may be a sun to someone. within a galaxy are stars and worlds and, it may be, a proliferation of living things and intelligent beings and spacefaring civilizations. but from afar, a galaxy reminds me more of a collection of lovely found objects -- seashells, perhaps, or corals, the productions of nature laboring for aeons in the cosmic ocean.
• each star system is an island in space, quarantined from its neighbors by the light-years. i can imagine creatures evolving into glimmerings of knowledge on innumerable worlds, every one of them assuming at first their puny planet and paltry few suns to be all that is. we grow up in isolation. only slowly do we teach ourselves the cosmos.
• human beings, born ultimately of the stars and now for a while inhabiting a world called earth, have begun their long voyage home.
• all life on earth is closely related. we have a common organic chemistry and a common evolutionary heritage. as a result, our biologists are profoundly limited. they study only a single kind of biology, one lonely theme in the music of life. is this faint and reedy tune the only voice for thousands of light-years? or is there a kind of cosmic fugue, with themes and counterpoints, dissonances and harmonies, a billion different voices playing the life music of the galaxy?
• this revolution made cosmos out of chaos. the early greeks had believed that the first being was chaos, corresponding to the phrase in genesis in the same context, "without form." chaos created and then mated with a goddess called night, and their offspring eventually produced all the gods and men. a universe created from chaos was in perfect keeping with the greek belief in an unpredictable nature run by capricious gods. but in the sixth century b.c., in ionia, a new concept developed, one of the great ideas of the human species. the universe is knowable, the ancient ionians argued, because it exhibits an internal order: there are regularities in nature that permit its secrets to be uncovered. nature is not entirely unpredictable; there are rules even she must obey. this ordered and admirable character of the universe was called cosmos.
• as long as there have been humans, we have searched for our place in the cosmos. in the childhood of our species (when our ancestors gazed a little idly at the stars), among the ionian scientists of ancient greece, and in our own age, we have been transfixed by this question: where are we? who are we? we find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy between which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. this perspective is a corageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as celestial flame, the galaxy as the backbone of the night.
• we embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: what are the stars? exploration is in our nature. we began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. we have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. we are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
• we have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. -- tombstone epitaph of two amateur astronomers
• not one of those worlds will be identical to earth. a few will be hospitable; most will appear hostile. many will be achingly beautiful. in some worlds there will be many suns in the daytime sky, many moons in the heavens at night, or great particle ring systems soaring from horizon to horizon. some moons will be so close that their planet will loom high in the heavens, covering half the sky. and some worlds will look out onto a vast gaseous nebula, the remains of an ordinary star that once was and is no longer. in all of those skies, rich in distant and exotic constellations, there will be a faint yellow star -- perhaps barely seen by the naked eye, perhaps visible only through the telescope -- the home star of the fleet of interstellar transports exploring this tiny region of the great milky way galaxy.
• the origin and evolution of life are connected in the most intimate way with the origin and evolution of the stars.
• there is an idea -- strange, haunting, evocative -- one of the most exquisite conjectures in science or religion. it is entirely undemonstrated; it may never be proved. but it stirs the blood. there is, we are told, an infinite hierarchy of universes, so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed univer. within it, organized into the local equivalent of galaxies and smaller structures, are an immense number of other, much tinier elementary particles, which are themselves universes at the next level and so on forever -- an infinite downward regression, universes within universes, endlessly. and upward as well. our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite regress.
• there are worlds on which life has never arisen. there are worlds that have been charred and ruined by cosmic catastrophes. we are fortunate: we are alive; we are powerful; the welfare of our civilization and our species is in our hands. if we do not speak for earth, who will? if we are not committed to our own survival, who will be?
• it has the sound of epic myth, and rightly. but it is simply a description of cosmic evolution as revealed by the science of our time. we are difficult to come by and a danger to ourselves. but any account of cosmic evolution makes it clear that all the creatures of the earth, the latest manufactures of the galactic hydrogen industry, are beings to be cherished. elsewhere there may be other equally astonishing transmutations of matter, so wistfully we listen for a humming in the sky.
• for we are the local embodiment of a cosmos grown to self-awareness. we have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. our loyalties are to the species and the planet. we speak for earth. our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.