Overwhelming sadness

“It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
Actor William Shatner, famous for his portrayal of Star Trek's Captain Kirk, on his trip to orbit in 2021 at age 90. From an excerpt of his biography, William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness’ (Vanity, Oct 6, 2022). Shatners biography, co-written by Josh Brandon, is titled, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria, 2022).
“Talking to the Kuiper belt is like talking to an Ent, from the other side of the forest.”
— Astrophysicist @ascendingNode, on communicating with the New Horizons spacecraft at the edge of the solar system, 8 December 2018. Note the distance between Earth and the probe (1.57 billion KM) and the power of the signal we receive from it (1.46 x 10-21 kW, which is a very very very small voice to hear.
ent
“There are questions that we can answer here that we can’t answer anywhere else.”
— Joseph Levy, Geologist, University of Texas-Austin
Mars, episode 4, at 44:01

Levy continues: “When the wind is howling. When it is -20° or -30° it's enough to start me thinking about having frostbite or hypothermia. Despite being dangerous and extremely cold and having hazards all around you there are questions that we can answer here that we can't answer anywhere else.”

The Hubble volume

“The Hubble volume is the sphere of space visible to the Hubble telescope—i.e. everything that’s not receding from us at a rate greater than the speed of light due to the expansion of the universe. The Hubble volume is an unfathomably large 1031 cubic light years.”
— That’s 846,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic kilometers.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html

“The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”
— The Really Big One—An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest, The question is when. Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, July 20, 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one–

"Our values and yearnings"

newHorizonsSpacecraft.jpg
“It’s impossible to gaze at the photos of Pluto sent back by the New Horizons spacecraft, and not be awash with wonder at the marvels of nature and the daring behind our choice to explore it. […] It matters not that [New Horizons] is a machine: We made it, which means it embodies our values and yearnings and speaks to our sense of ourselves as fully as any painting or cathedral might. We anthropomorphize the machines, as we should.”
— Steve Pyne, The Meaning of NASA’s New Images of Pluto, The Atlantic, October 10, 2015

Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. Licensed under Public Domain via Creative Commons (link)

Thanks to @DarrenMilligan for the find.