A Quote by Seth Shostak

Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.

Seth Shostak

Quote Topics

Away Eternal Even Few Flat Future Hundred Imposing Less Makes Million Million Years Most Mountains New New One Our Our Future Plate Without Would Would Be Years

Quote Author

Seth Shostak
American - Scientist

This is our most complete record by far. A Hundred Million Suns sounds like the marriage of everything we learned from the Jeepster years and the Fiction years made into something new and bolder. Our spikiness and our indie-ness are coming through again with all the poppiness of the last two records. There's a lot of melody here and you can't cloak that whatever you do with it. This album is touched by our entire history, and hopefully sounds like our future too.

Gary Lightbody

Planets that don't currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life.

Seth Shostak

It is very remarkable that while the words Eternal, Eternity, Forever, are constantly in our mouths, and applied without hesitation, we yet experience considerable difficulty in contemplating any definite term which bears a very large proportion to the brief cycles of our petty chronicles. There are many minds that would not for an instant doubt the God of Nature to have existed from all Eternity, and would yet reject as preposterous the idea of going back a million of years in the History of His Works. Yet what is a million, or a million million, of solar revolutions to an Eternity?

George Julius Poulett Scrope

The Dolomites are the most beautiful rock mountains in the world, but in a few million years they will just be desert.

Reinhold Messner

It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

George Gamow

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

Spider Robinson

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

James Lovelock

Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

Elizabeth Kolbert

If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?

T. H. White

Today the two hundred million men in our country are entering into a civilized new world...but we, the two hundred million women, are still kept down in the dungeon.

Qiu Jin

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

Carl Sagan

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Mark Twain

A Hundred Years From Now Well a hundred years from now I won't be crying A hundred years from now I won't be blue And my heart would have forgotton she broke ever vow I won't care a hundred years from now Oh, it seem like yesterday you told me You couldn't live without my love somehow Now that you're with another it breaks my heart somehow I won't care a hundred years from now * Refrain Now do you recall the night sweetheart you promised Another's kiss you never would allow That's all in the past dear it didn't seem to last I won't care a hundred years from now * Refrain

Lester Flatt

Shouldn't we suppose that many of our most painful ordeals will look quite different a million years from now, as we recall them on the New Earth? What if one day we discover that God has wasted nothing in our life on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy?

Randy Alcorn

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.