"I loved The Travels of Marco Polo. It amazed me how he would walk -- maybe 30 miles a day is what a human being can walk back then -- and he would go from one world to another world. And the one world he could go to was like Eden, an incredibly wonderful place, and down the road was Hell. And how there was such diversity on our planet. Now you find McDonald's everywhere. But there was a diversity of the human species that mimicked other life. The true beauty of this planet is its diversity, not its sameness. So Marco Polo just opened up my eyes to the diversity of the human experience. Jules Verne opened me up to the fantasies of the time machine. I loved 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain Nemo! Here was a person who built his own submarine, using advanced technology, nuclear energy before anyone even knew that it existed. He was a technologist, but he was an adventurer. He explored beneath the sea. He had a giant window, and he saw the sea through that window, and that's exactly what I'm doing."
Dr. Robert Ballard
