James Lovelock

Gaia must continue her work of cooling the planet, because it is now old and frail. With age, as I am all too well aware, we become more fragile.

I am pretty sure that only Earth has incubated a creature capable of knowing the cosmos. But I am equally sure that the existence of that creature is imperilled. We are unique, privileged beings and, for that reason, we should cherish every moment of our awareness. We should now be cherishing those moments even more because our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end.

If we have the international will to construct a rocket carrying a deflection package, then, for the first time ever, a planet of the solar system, the Earth, will have evolved the capacity to sense the approach of a large rock blundering through space on a deadly collision course and, much more than this, it will have evolved the means and the power to deflect its dangerous trajectory and save itself