“By all laws of conventional physics, atoms shouldn't therefore exist.”
"The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole on the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthfull of delicious sandworms.”
“This is decidedly off because the atoms that so liberally flock together to form living things are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.”
“We live in a world that doesn't alltogether seem to want us here.”
“Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.”
“The universe was created in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”
“It seemed as if there was no end of strangeness.”
“Without the Moon's steadying influence, the Earth would wobble like a dying top, with who knows what consequences for climate and weather.”
"Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't), shrinking a proton down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.”
“Volcanologists may or may not be the worst scientists in the world at making predictions, but thay are without question the worst in the world at realizing how bad their predictions are.”
“And in all likelihood, remember, this would come without warning, out of a clear sky.”
“Not one of your direct ancestors was devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's quest of delivering a tiny change of genetic material in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result astoundingly, and all too briefly, you.”
“One thunderstorm can contain an amount of energy equivalent to four days' use of electricity for the whole United States."
“Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. ”
“We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. ”
"When your spark is gone, every molecule you own will be nibbled off you or sluiced away to be put to use in some other system. That's just the way it is."
“In the most literal way, we are made of the right stuff.”
"Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings."
"At various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more."
"To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement."
"Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn't survive a day without them."
"Needless to say, almost no one in the audience had the faintest idea what he was talking about."
"Yellowstone's eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one, interestingly enough, was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due."
"Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you. Indeed, they don't even know that they are there."
"The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within it is a wonder."
"Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code."
"We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas."
"Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of."
"If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take over 3 weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life, but it would take you 20 years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period."
"Of the billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, 99.99% are no longer around. Life on Earth is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it."
"If you are in good healh and averagely diligent about hygeine, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains - about a hundrey thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin."
"A big part of the reason that Earth seems so miraculously accommodating is that we evolved to suit its conditions."
"As Earth warmed, it probably had the wildest weather it ever experienced, with hurricanes powerful enough to raise waves to the heights of skyscrapers and rainfalls of great intensity."
"Zinc - bless it - oxidizes alcohol."
"The good news is that even here nature is quite wonderful."
"A tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year."
"Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really, it's a battleground."
"Ambulant self-activating protoplasm."
"A typical solar flare, we wouldn't even notice on Earth, will release the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs and fling into space a hundred billion tons of murderous high-energy particles."