A beautiful prose...

"The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land."

- T.H Huxley.

"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 spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

The science and the age of cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy and that knowledge is a pre-requisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Those explorations required skepticism and imagination both. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The cosmos is rich beyond measure - in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From 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 known 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. "

"The earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place. No plant or star or galaxy can be typical, because the cosmos is mostly empty. The only typical place is within the vast, cold, 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. If we were randomly inserted into the cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion. In everyday life such odds are called compelling. Worlds are precious.

From an intergalactic vantage point we could 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 in the great cosmic dark. Before us is the cosmos on the grandest scale we know. We are in the realm of the nebulae, eight billion light years from the earth, halfway to the edge of the known universe. "

---- Carl Sagan, Cosmos.