I … had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before,” wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, “but as far as it was possible for man to go.

One of the most remarkable voyagers in the long history of the seas, he [James Cook] deserves far more praise than blame. Contrary to the common belief, he admired the Aborigines and facets of their traditional way of life. Above all he grasped this continent and began unknowingly the work of knitting it again to the outside world. On the whole the outside world has gained because of his epic voyage. The settlers who arrived after him eventually made this land so productive that it is capable, almost annually, of feeding tens of millions of people in foreign lands as well as all those in Australia. Here flourishes a democratic society which offers freedom in a world where freedom is not — and never was — the right of most people.

In 1512, in handwritten notes on an enigmatic map that he had prepared showing the newly discovered Americas, the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis offered an intriguing answer to all these questions — at any rate for the particular case of Christopher Colombus, the most recent and most renowned of the ancient Atlantic dreamers. Piri's note, one of many on the same map, is written over the interior of Brazil:
'Apparently a Genoese infidel, by the name of Columbus was the one who discovered these parts. This is how it happened: a book came into the hands of this Colombus from which he found out that the Western Sea [i.e. the Atlantic] has an end, in other words that there is a coast and islands on its western side with many kinds of ores and gems. Having read this book through, he recounted all these things to the Genoese elders and said, 'Come, give me two ships, and I shall go and find these places.' They said, 'Foolish man, is there an end to the Western Sea? It is filled with the mists of darkness.

Let me end with... man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon. ...Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with... fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas... wrote... ... wrote... The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy... they all tried to guess where... earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—... the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he... came to conceive... that the moon is like a ball... thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon... he went on to calculate how long... the distant moon would take to round the earth... [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.

I whose ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go ...

"While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (from "The Third and Final Continent")

He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

Cook was a giant of the sea. To deprive him, his scientists and his crew of high praise would be mean-spirited and would mock history. He was almost certainly the first European to sail along and report on nearly all the eastern coast of Australia. He indirectly made possible present-day Australia which, despite its many failures, is surely one of the success stories of the world. On the other hand, Aboriginal peoples will rightly insist that they, or people close to them in kinship, were the first discoverers of Australia. Their ancestors, one after the other, had sailed and walked along the Indonesian archipelago, a chain of stepping stones that were easily used when the world’s sea levels were lower.

above all, Albert Einstein was a true believer in the scientist's duty to communicate with the public...those attending heard not much more than the words that began his speech: "If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people." This always has been and always will be, the dream of Cosmos. When I stumbled upon Einstein's rarely quoted words of that night during some random late-night wandering on YouTube, I found the credo for 40 years of my life's work. Einstein was urging us to tear down the walls around science that have excluded and intimidated so many of us-to translate scientific insights from the technical jargon of its priesthood into the spoken language shared by us all, so that we may take these insights to heart and be changed by a personal encounter with the wonders they reveal...We didn't know that particular Einstein quote when Carl and I began writing the original Cosmos in 1980 with astronomer Steven Soter. We just felt a kind of evangelical urgency to share the awesome power of science, to convey the spiritual uplift of the universe it reveals, and to amplify the alarms that Carl, Steve, and other scientists were sounding about our impact on the planet. Cosmos gave voice to those forebodings, but it was also suffused with hope, with a sense of human self-esteem derived, in part, from our successes in finding our way in the universe, and from the courage of those scientists who dared to uncover and express forbidden truths.

The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.

Cosmos is for many that first encounter with the universe that you thought was foreclosed to you because you couldn’t do the math, or you live in a place where there are no scientists to invite you in. Carl wanted everyone to come on this voyage; to experience the power of the scientific perspective and the wonders it reveals. His secret was to recapture the person he was before he understood the concept and then retrace his own thought steps toward comprehension. It worked. He inspired legions to study, teach, and do science.

This is from an Indian comedian named Charlie Hill: “They say Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean. My people were living here for hundreds and hundreds of years. We never noticed it? “One day the chief took his son to the top of a mountain. As they looked out over the hills and valleys, he spread his arms wide and said, ‘Son, someday none of this will be yours.

When Carl wrote Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, he imagined an Encyclopedia Galactica-a reference work that includes all the worlds of all the stars. He was bravely writing at a time before a single exoplanet had been discovered and long before the internet. In the decades since, we have located thousands of planets orbiting other stars. His dream of the Encyclopedia Galactica is a little closer to reality now.