For thousands of years humans were oppressed — as some of us still are — by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by … - Carl Sagan

The U.S. Library of Congress has recently designated Cosmos one of the eighty-eight books “that shaped America.

If you’re young, it’s just possible that we will be taking our first steps on near-Earth asteroids and Mars during your lifetime. To spread out to the moons of the Jovian planets and the Kuiper Comet Belt will take many generations more. The Oort Cloud will require much longer still. By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. The different circumstances we will be living under will have changed us. Prostheses and genetic engineering will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re an adaptable species.
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, a species returned to circumstances more like those for which it was originally evolved, more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent — the sorts of beings we would want to represent us in a Universe that, for all we know, is filled with species much older, much
more powerful, and very different.
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.