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By Exploring Other Worlds We Safeguard This One. By Itself, I Think This Fact More Than Justifies The Money Our Species Has Spent In Sending Ships To Other Worlds. It Is Our Fate To Live During One Of The Most Perilous And, At The Same Time, One Of The Most Hopeful Chapters In Human History.

-Carl Sagan

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By Exploring Other Worlds

Carl Sagan

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By Exploring Other Worlds We Safeguard This One. By Itself, I Think This Fact More Than Justifies The Money Our Species Has Spent In Sending Ships To Other Worlds. It Is Our Fate To Live During One Of The Most Perilous And, At The Same Time, One Of The Most Hopeful Chapters In Human History.

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On The Day That We Do Discover That We Are Not Alone, Our Society May Begin To Evolve And Transform In Some Incredible And Wondrous New Ways.

The Immense Distances To The Stars And The Galaxies Mean That We See Everything Ins Pace Int He Past, Some As They Were Before The Earth Came To Be. Telescopes Are Time Machines.

We Are The Custodians Of Life's Meaning.

I Believe That Even A Smattering Of Such Findings In Modern Science And Mathematics Is Far More Compelling And Exciting Than Most Of The Doctrines Of Pseudoscience, Whose Practitioners Were Condemned As Early As The Fifth Century B.c. By The Ionian Philosopher Heraclitus As “nigh -walkers, Magicians, Priests Of Bacchus, Priestesses Of The Wine-vat, Mystery-mongers.” But Science Is More Intricate And Subtle, Reveals A Much Richer Imiverse, And Powerfully Evokes Our Sense Of Wonder.

If We Offer Too Much Silent Assent About Mysticism And Superstition - Even When It Seems To Be Doing A Little Good - We Abet A General Climate In Which Scepticism Is Considered Impolite, Science Tiresome, And Rigorous Thinking Somehow Stuffy And Inappropriate.

Perhaps, In Retrospect, There Would Be Little Motivation Even For Malevolent Extraterrestrials To Attack The Earth; Perhaps, After A Preliminary Survey, They Might Decide It Is More Expedient Just To Be Patient For A Little While And Wait For Us To Self-destruct.

In The Long Run, The Aggressive Civilizations Destroy Themselves, Almost Always. It's Their Nature. They Can't Help It.

Any Sufficiently Crisp Question Can Be Answered By A Single Binary Digit-0 Or 1, Yes Or No.

In A Lot Of Scientists, The Ratio Of Wonder To Skepticism Declines In Time. That May Be Connected With The Fact That In Some Fields-mathematics, Physics, Some Others-the Great Discoveries Are Almost Entirely Made By Youngsters.

I Would Love To Believe That When I Die I Will Live Again, That Some Thinking, Feeling, Remembering Part Of Me Will Continue.

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.

Maybe It's A Little Early. Maybe The Time Is Not Quite Yet. But Those Other Worlds - Promising Untold Opportunities - Beckon. Silently, They Orbit The Sun, Waiting.

(when Asked Merely If They Accept Evolution, 45 Percent Of Americans Say Yes. The Figure Is 70 Percent In China.) When The Movie Jurassic Park Was Shown In Israel, It Was Condemned By Some Orthodox Rabbis Because It Accepted Evolution And Because It Taught That Dinosaurs Lived A Hundred Million Years Ago-when, As Is Plainly Stated At Every Rosh Hashonhan And Every Jewish Wedding Ceremony, The Universe Is Less Than 6,000 Years Old.

Each Of Us Is A Tiny Being, Permitted To Ride On The Outermost Skin Of One Of The Smaller Planets For A Few Dozen Trips Around The Local Star.

One Of The Greatest Gifts Adults Can Give - To Their Offspring And To Their Society - Is To Read To Children.

What A Marvelous Cooperative Arrangement - Plants And Animals Each Inhaling Each Other's Exhalations, A Kind Of Planet-wide Mutual Mouth-to-stoma Resuscitation, The Entire Elegant Cycle Powered By A Star 150 Million Kilometers Away.

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.

Our Ancestors Worshipped The Sun, And They Were Not That Foolish. It Makes Sense To Revere The Sun And The Stars, For We Are Their Children.

Widespread Intellectual And Moral Docility May Be Convenient For Leaders In The Short Term, But It Is Suicidal For Nations In The Long Term. One Of The Criteria For National Leadership Should Therefore Be A Talent For Understanding, Encouraging, And Making Constructive Use Of Vigorous Criticism.

Cleverly Designed Experiments Are The Key.

When We Look Up At Night And View The Stars, Everything We See Is Shinning Because Of Distant Nuclear Fusion.

Science Cuts Two Ways, Of Course; Its Products Can Be Used For Both Good And Evil. But There's No Turning Back From Science. The Early Warnings About Technological Dangers Also Come From Science.

Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions, Binding Together People Who Never Knew Each Other, Citizens Of Distant Epochs. Books Break The Shackles Of Time. A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Magic.

While Our Behavior Is Still Significantly Controlled By Our Genetic Inheritance, We Have, Through Our Brains, A Much Richer Opportunity To Blaze New Behavioral And Cultural Pathways On Short Timescales.

I Believe That The Extraordinary Should Be Pursued. But Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

Imagination Will Often Carry Us To Worlds That Never Were. But Without It We Go Nowhere.

In Science It Often Happens That Scientists Say, "you Know That's A Really Good Argument; My Position Is Mistaken..."

Theoretical Physics

Every Time You Look Up At The Sky, Every One Of Those Points Of Light Is A Reminder That Fusion Power Is Extractable From Hydrogen And Other Light Elements, And It Is An Everyday Reality Throughout The Milky Way Galaxy.

We Are At A Crossroads In Human History. Never Before Has There Been A Moment So Simultaneously Perilous And Promising. We Are The First Species To Have Taken Evolution Into Our Own Hands.

There Is Every Reason To Think That In The Coming Years Mars And Its Mysteries Will Become Increasingly Familiar To The Inhabitants Of The Planet Earth.

There Are In Fact 100 Billion Galaxies, Each Of Which Contain Something Like A 100 Billion Stars. Think Of How Many Stars, And Planets, And Kinds Of Life There May Be In This Vast And Awesome Universe.

I Believe That In Every Person Is A Kind Of Circuit Which Resonates To Intellectual Discovery-and The Idea Is To Make That Resonance Work

Valid Criticism Does You A Favor.

One Of The Saddest Lessons Of History Is This: If We’ve Been Bamboozled Long Enough, We Tend To Reject Any Evidence Of The Bamboozle. We’re No Longer Interested In Finding Out The Truth. The Bamboozle Has Captured Us. It’s Simply Too Painful To Acknowledge, Even To Ourselves, That We’ve Been Taken. Once You Give A Charlatan Power Over You, You Almost Never Get It Back.

Skeptical Scrutiny Is The Means, In Both Science And Religion, By Which Deep Thoughts Can Be Winnowed From Deep Nonsense.

The Open Road Still Softly Calls, Like A Nearly Forgotten Song Of Childhood

Organic As A Dandelion Seed, [the Ship Of Our Imagination] Will Carry Us To Worlds Of Dreams And Worlds Of Facts

It Is The Tension Between Creativity And Skepticism That Has Produced The Stunning And Unexpected Findings Of Science.

Once We Overcome Our Fear Of Being Tiny, We Find Ourselves On The Threshold Of A Vast And Awesome Universe That Utterly Dwarfs — In Time, In Space, And In Potential — The Tidy Anthropocentric Proscenium Of Our Ancestors.

Some 5 Billion Years From Now, There Will Be A Last Perfect Day On Earth... Then The Sun Will Begin To Die, Life Will Be Extinguished, The Oceans Will Boil And Evaporate Away.

The Prediction Of Nuclear Winter Is Drawn Not, Of Course, From Any Direct Experience With The Consequences Of Global Nuclear War, But Rather From An Investigation Of The Governing Physics.

In The Vastness Of Space And The Immensity Of Time, It Is My Joy To Share A Planet And An Epoch With Annie.

It Took The Church Until 1832 To Remove Galileo 's Work From Its List Of Books Which Catholics Were Forbidden To Read At The Risk Of Dire Punishment Of Their Immortal Souls.

There Are Many Hypotheses In Science Which Are Wrong. That’s Perfectly All Right: It’s The Aperture To Finding Out What’s Right. Science Is A Self-correcting Process.

Humans — Who Enslave, Castrate, Experiment On, And Fillet Other Animals — Have Had An Understandable Penchant For Pretending Animals Do Not Feel Pain. A Sharp Distinction Between Humans And 'animals' Is Essential If We Are To Bend Them To Our Will, Make Them Work For Us, Wear Them, Eat Them — Without Any Disquieting Tinges Of Guilt Or Regret. It Is Unseemly Of Us, Who Often Behave So Unfeelingly Toward Other Animals, To Contend That Only Humans Can Suffer. The Behavior Of Other Animals Renders Such Pretensions Specious. They Are Just Too Much Like Us.

Who Are We, If Not Measured By Our Impact On Others?

The Cosmos Is Full Beyond Measure Of Elegant Truths; Of Exquisite Interrelationships; Of The Awesome Machinery Of Nature.

When Kepler Found His Long-cherished Belief Did Not Agree With The Most Precise Observation, He Accepted The Uncomfortable Fact. He Preferred The Hard Truth To His Dearest Illusions, That Is The Heart Of Science.

The Earth Is A Place. It Is By No Means The Only Place. It Is Not Even A Typical Place.

Our Posturings, Our Imagined Self-importance , The Delusion That We Have Some Privileged Position In The Universe Are Challenged By This Point Of Pale Light.

[one's] Inability To Invalidate Your Hypothesis Is Not At All The Same Thing As Proving It True.

Every Thinking Person Fears Nuclear War, And Every Technological State Plans For It. Everyone Knows It Is Madness, And Every Nation Has An Excuse

The Cure For A Fallacious Argument Is A Better Argument, Not The Suppression Of Ideas.

The Total Number Of Stars In The Universe Is Larger Than All The Grains Of Sand On All The Beaches Of The Planet Earth.

If You Want To Make A [rhubarb] Pie From Scratch, First You Have To Create The Universe.

The Cosmos Is All That Is Or Ever Was Or Ever Will Be.

Man Is The Matter Of The Cosmos, Contemplating Itself.

The Fact Is That Far More Crime And Child Abuse Has Been Committed By Zealots In The Name Of God, Jesus And Mohammed Than Has Ever Been Committed In The Name Of Satan. Many People Don’t Like That Statement, But Few Can Argue With It.

If All The Suns But Ours Collapsed Tonight, How Many Lifetimes Would It Take Us To Realize That We Were Alone?

Nothing Disturbs Me More Than The Glorification Of Stupidity.

What Is Called For Is An Exquisite Balance Between Two Conflicting Needs: The Most Skeptical Scrutiny Of All Hypotheses That Are Served Up To Us And At The Same Time A Great Openness To New Ideas. If You Are Only Skeptical, Then No New Ideas Make It Through To You. On The Other Hand, If You Are Open To The Point Of Gullibility And Have Not An Ounce Of Skeptical Sense In You, Then You Cannot Distinguish Useful Ideas From The Worthless Ones.

We Are Made Of Stellar Ash. Our Origin And Evolution Have Been Tied To Distant Cosmic Events. The Exploration Of The Cosmos Is A Voyage Of Self-discovery.

There Is A Lurking Fear That Some Things Are Not “meant" To Be Known, That Some Inquiries Are Too Dangerous For Human Beings To Make.

Keeping Secrets

Some Things Are Meant To Be

We Make Our World Significant By The Courage Of Our Questions And The Depth Of Our Answers

[science] Is Not Perfect. It Can Be Misused. It Is Only A Tool. But It Is By Far The Best Tool We Have, Self-correcting, Ongoing, Applicable To Everything. It Has Two Rules. First: There Are No Sacred Truths; All Assumptions Must Be Critically Examined; Arguments From Authority Are Worthless. Second: Whatever Is Inconsistent With The Facts Must Be Discarded Or Revised. ... The Obvious Is Sometimes False; The Unexpected Is Sometimes True.

We Are Star Stuff Which Has Taken Its Destiny Into Its Own Hands.

Religions Are Often State-protected Nurseries Of Pseudoscience, Although There's No Reason Why Religions Have To Play That Role. In A Way, It's An Artefact From Times Long Gone.

We Humans Appear On The Cosmic Calendar So Recently That Our Recorded History Occupies Only The Last Few Seconds Of The Last Minute Of December 31st.

When You Buy A Used Car, You Kick The Tires, You Look At The Odometer, You Open Up The Hood. If You Do Not Feel Yourself An Expert In Automobile Engines, You Bring A Friend Who Is. And You Do This With Something As Unimportant As An Automobile. But On The Issues Of The Transcendent, Of Ethics, Of Morals, Of The Origins Of The World, Of The Nature Of Human Beings, On Those Issues Should We Not Insist Upon At Least Equally Skeptical Scrutiny?

Arguments From Authority Carry Little Weight – Authorities Have Made Mistakes In The Past. They Will Do So Again In The Future. Perhaps A Better Way To Say It Is That In Science There Are No Authorities; At Most, There Are Experts.

The Illegality Of Cannabis Is Outrageous.

Much Of Human History Can, I Think, Be Described As A Gradual And Sometimes Painful Liberation From Provincialism, The Emerging Awareness That There Is More To The World Than Was Generally Believed By Our Ancestors.

Absolute Certainty Will Always Elude Us. We Will Always Be Mired In Error. The Most Each Generation Can Hope For Is To Reduce The Error. . . .

Don't Judge Everyone Else By Your Own Limited Experience.

If We're Capable Of Conjuring Up Terrifying Monsters In Childhood, Why Shouldn't Some Of Us, At Least On Occasion, Be Able To Fantasize Something Similar, Something Truly Horrifying, A Shared Delusion, As Adults?

A New Consciousness Is Developing Which Sees The Earth As A Single Organism And Recognizes That An Organism At War With Itself Is Doomed. We Are One Planet. One Of The Great Revelations Of The Age Of Space Exploration Is The Image Of The Earth Finite And Lonely, Somehow Vulnerable, Bearing The Entire Human Species Through The Oceans Of Space And Time.

What Began In Deadly Competition Has Helped Us To See That Global Cooperation Is The Essential Precondition For Our Survival. Travel Is Broadening. It's Time To Hit The Road Again.

We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still.

In College, In The Early 1950s, I Began To Learn A Little About How Science Works, The Secrets Of Its Great Success, How Rigorous The Standards Of Evidence Must Be If We Are Really To Know Something Is True, How Many False Starts And Dead Ends Have Plagued Human Thinking, How Our Biases Can Colour Our Interpretation Of Evidence, And How Often Belief Systems Widely Held And Supported By The Political, Religious And Academic Hierarchies Turn Out To Be Not Just Slightly In Error, But Grotesquely Wrong.

The Surface Of The Earth Is The Shore Of The Cosmic Ocean. From It We Have Learned Most Of What We Know. Recently, We Have Waded A Little Out To Sea, Enough To Dampen Our Toes Or, At Most, Wet Our Ankles. The Water Seems Inviting. The Ocean Calls.

A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits / Not A Sunrise, But A Galaxy-rise / A Morning Filled With 400 Billion Suns / The Rising Of The Milky Way

The Idea That God Is An Oversized White Male With A Flowing Beard, Who Sits In The Sky And Tallies The Fall Of Every Sparrow Is Ludicrous. But If By 'god,' One Means The Set Of Physical Laws That Govern The Universe, Then Clearly There Is Such A God. This God Is Emotionally Unsatisfying... It Does Not Make Much Sense To Pray To The Law Of Gravity.

The Reappearance Of The Crescent Moon After The New Moon; The Return Of The Sun After A Total Eclipse, The Rising Of The Sun In The Morning After Its Troublesome Absence At Night Were Noted By People Around The World; These Phenomena Spoke To Our Ancestors Of The Possibility Of Surviving Death. Up There In The Skies Was Also A Metaphor Of Immortality.

I'm Only A Four-dimensional Creature. Haven't Got A Clue How To Visualise Infinity. Even Einstein Hadn't. I Know Because I Asked Him

I Went To The Librarian And Asked For A Book About Stars.... And The Answer Was Stunning. It Was That The Sun Was A Star But Really Close. The Stars Were Suns, But So Far Away They Were Just Little Points Of Light.... The Scale Of The Universe Suddenly Opened Up To Me. It Was A Kind Of Religious Experience. There Was A Magnificence To It, A Grandeur, A Scale Which Has Never Left Me. Never Ever Left Me.

I Believe Our Future Depends Powerfully On How Well We Understand This Cosmos In Which We Float, Like A Mote Of Dust In The Morning Sky.

It's Sometimes Easier To Reject Strong Evidence Than To Admit That We've Been Wrong, This Is Information About Ourselves Worth Having.

But I Try Not To Think With My Gut. If I'm Serious About Understanding The World, Thinking With Anything Besides My Brain, As Tempting As That Might Be, Is Likely To Get Me Into Trouble.

The Dumbing Down Of America Is Evident In The Slow Decay Of Substantive Content, A Kind Of Celebration Of Ignorance.

Ask Courageous Questions. Do Not Be Satisfied With Superficial Answers.

We Humans Look Rather Different From A Tree. Without A Doubt We Perceive The World Differently Than A Tree Does. But Down Deep, At The Molecular Heart Of Life, The Trees And We Are Essentially Identical.

There Are As Many Atoms In One Molecule Of Dna As There Are Stars In A Typical Galaxy.

If There Is Life, Then I Believe We Should Do Nothing To Disturb That Life. Mars Then, Belongs To The Martians, Even If They Are Microbes.

We On Earth Have Just Awakened To The Great Oceans Of Space And Time From Which We Have Emerged.

Science Is A Way Of Thinking That Helps You Not To Fool Yourself.

Philosophers And Scientists Confidently Offer Up Traits Said To Be Uniquely Human, And The Monkeys And Apes Casually Knock Them Down -- Toppling The Pretension That Humans Constitute Some Sort Of Biological Aristocracy Among The Beings On Earth.

We Are The Children Equally Of The Sky And The Earth.

We Have Heard The Rationales Offered By The Nuclear Superpowers. We Know Who Speaks For The Nations. But Who Speaks For The Human Species? Who Speaks For Earth?

Is It Fair To Be Suspicious Of An Entire Profession Because Of A Few Bad Apples? There Are At Least Two Important Differences, It Seems To Me. First, No One Doubts That Science Actually Works, Whatever Mistaken And Fraudulent Claim May From Time To Time Be Offered. But Whether There Are Any Miraculous Cures From Faith-healing, Beyond The Body's Own Ability To Cure Itself, Is Very Much At Issue. Secondly, The Expose' Of Fraud And Error In Science Is Made Almost Exclusively By Science. But The Exposure Of Fraud And Error In Faith-healing Is Almost Never Done By Other Faith-healers.

A Single Message From Space Will Show That It Is Possible To Live Through Technological Adolescence. . . . It Is Possible That The Future Of Human Civilization Depends On The Receipt Of Interstellar Messages.

My Parents Were Not Scientists. They Knew Almost Nothing About Science. But In Introducing Me Simultaneously To Skepticism And To Wonder, They Taught Me The Two Uneasily Cohabiting Modes Of Thought That Are Central To The Scientific Method.

Better By Far To Embrace The Hard Truth Than A Reassuring Fable. If We Crave Some Cosmic Purpose, Then Let Us Find Ourselves A Worthy Goal.

I Also Wish That The Pledge Of Allegiance Were Directed At The Constitution And The Bill Of Rights, As It Is When The President Takes His Oath Of Office, Rather Than To The Flag And The Nation

Except In Pure Mathematics, Nothing Is Known For Certain (although Much Is Certainly False).

Your Religion Assumes That People Are Children And Need A Boogeyman So They'll Behave. You Want People To Believe In God So They'll Obey The Law. That's The Only Means That Occurs To You: A Strict Secular Police Force, And The Threat Of Punishment By An All-seeing God For Whatever The Police Overlook. You Sell Human Beings Short.

After I Give Lectures-on Almost Any Subject-i Am Often Asked, "do You Believe In Ufos?" I'm Always Struck By How The Question Is Phrased, The Suggestion That This Is A Matter Of Belief And Not Evidence. I'm Almost Never Asked, "how Good Is The Evidence That Ufos Are Alien Spaceships?"

Time Spent With Children Is Time Well Spent. Their Little Minds Are Not Constrained By 'reality' Or Focused Upon Goals. Anything And Everything Is Possible. Imagination Will Often Carry Us To Worlds That Never Were. But Without It We Go Nowhere.

The Method Of Science Is Tried And True. It Is Not Perfect, It's Just The Best We Have. And To Abandon It, With Its Skeptical Protocols, Is The Pathway To A Dark Age.

Accommodation To Change, The Thoughtful Pursuit Of Alternative Futures Are Keys To The Survival Of Civilization And Perhaps Of The Human Species.

Exploration Is In Our Nature. We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still. We Have Lingered Long Enough On The Shores Of The Cosmic Ocean. We Are Ready At Last To Set Sail For The Stars.

Our Children Long For Realistic Maps Of The Future That They Can Be Proud Of. Where Are The Cartographers Of Human Purpose?

A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Working Magic.

Our Perceptions Are Fallible. We Sometimes See What Isn't There. We Are Prey To Optical Illusions. Occasionally We Hallucinate. We Are Error-prone.

Optical Illusions

The Bill Of Rights Decoupled Religion From The State, In Part Because So Many Religions Were Steeped In An Absolutist Frame Of Mind - Each Convinced That It Alone Had A Monopoly On The Truth And Therefore Eager For The State To Impose This Truth On Others.

Personally, I Would Be Delighted If There Were A Life After Death, Especially If It Permitted Me To Continue To Learn About This World And Others, If It Gave Me A Chance To Discover How History Turns Out.

For All Its Material Advantages, The Sedentary Life Has Left Us Edgy, Unfulfilled, Even After 400 Generations In Villages And Cities, We Haven't Forgotten: The Open Road Still Softly Calls Like A Nearly Forgotten Song Of Childhood.

The Truth May Be Puzzling. It May Take Some Work To Grapple With. It May Be Counterintuitive. It May Contradict Deeply Held Prejudices. It May Not Be Consonant With What We Desperately Want To Be True. But Our Preferences Do Not Determine What's True.

The Evidence, So Far At Least And Laws Of Nature Aside, Does Not Require A Designer. Maybe There Is One Hiding, Maddeningly Unwilling To Be Revealed.

If The Constellations Had Been Named In The Twentieth Century, I Suppose We Would See Bicycles And Refrigerators In The Sky.

The Old Appeals To Racial, Sexual And Religious Chauvinism To Rabid Nationalist Fervor, Are Beginning Not To Work.

Curiosity And The Urge To Solve Problems Are The Emotional Hallmarks Of Our Species.

In A Complex Universe, In A Society Undergoing Unprecedented Change, How Can We Find The Truth If We Are Not Willing To Question Everything And To Give A Fair Hearing To Everything?

We Are Not Smart Enough To Decide Which Pieces Of Knowledge Are Permissible And Which Are Not.

The Universe Seems Neither Benign Nor Hostile, Merely Indifferent.

I Consider It An Extremely Dangerous Doctrine, Because The More Likely We Are To Assume That The Solution Comes From The Outside, The Less Likely We Are To Solve Our Problems Ourselves.

I'd Like The [cosmos] Series To Be So Visually Stimulating That Somebody Who Isn't Even Interested In The Concepts Will Just Watch For The Effects. And I'd Like People Who Are Prepared To Do Some Thinking To Be Really Stimulated.

At The Heart Of Science Is An Essential Balance Between Two Seemingly Contradictory Attitudes-an Openness To New Ideas, No Matter How Bizarre Or Counterintuitive They May Be, And The Most Ruthless Skeptical Scrutiny Of All Ideas, Old And New. This Is How Deep Truths Are Winnowed From Deep Nonsense.

An Atheist Has To Know A Lot More Than I Know. An Atheist Is Someone Who Knows There Is No God. By Some Definitions Atheism Is Very Stupid.

There Is No God

Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Proof.

We Were Wanderers From The Beginning.

Those Who Seek Power At Any Price Detect A Societal Weakness, A Fear That They Can Ride Into Office.

An Extraterrestrial Being, Newly Arrived On Earth - Scrutinizing What We Mainly Present To Our Children In Television, Radio, Movies, Newspapers, Magazines, The Comics, And Many Books - Might Easily Conclude That We Are Intent On Teaching Them Murder, Rape, Cruelty, Superstition, Credulity, And Consumerism. We Keep At It, And Through Constant Repetition Many Of Them Finally Get It.

Religions Contradict One Another-on Small Matters, Such As Whether We Should Put On A Hat Or Take One Off On Entering A House Of Worship, Or Whether We Should Eat Beef And Eschew Pork Or The Other Way Around, All The Way To The Most Central Issues, Such As Whether There Are No Gods, One God, Or Many Gods.

Anything Else You're Interested In Is Not Going To Happen If You Can't Breathe The Air And Drink The Water. Don't Sit This One Out. Do Something. You Are By Accident Of Fate Alive At An Absolutely Critical Moment In The History Of Our Planet.

What A Splendid Perspective Contact With A Profoundly Different Civilization Might Provide! In A Cosmic Setting Vast And Old Beyond Ordinary Human Understanding We Are A Little Lonely, And We Ponder The Ultimate Significance, If Any, Of Our Tiny But Exquisite Blue Planet, The Earth.... In The Deepest Sense The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Is A Search For Ourselves.

Ours Is The First Generation That Has Grown Up With Science-fiction Ideas.

There Are Many Hypotheses In Physics Of Almost Comparable Brillance And Elegance That Have Been Rejected Because They Did Not Survive Such A Confrontation With Experiment. In My View, The Human Condition Would Be Greatly Improved If Such Confrontations And Willingness To Reject Hypotheses Were A Regular Part Of Our Social, Political, Economic, Religious And Cultural Lives.

If Chimpanzees Have Consciousness, If They Are Capable Of Abstractions, Do They Not Have What Until Now Has Been Described As 'human Rights'? How Smart Does A Chimp Have To Be Before Killing Him Constitutes Murder?

Chlorine Is A Deadly Poison Gas Employed On European Battlefields In World War I. Sodium Is A Corrosive Metal Which Burns Upon Contact With Water. Together They Make A Placid And Unpoisonous Material, Table Salt. Why Each Of These Substances Has The Properties It Does Is A Subject Called Chemistry.

The Hindu Religion Is The Only Of The World's Great Faiths Dedicated To The Idea That The Cosmos Itself Undergoes An Immense, Indeed An Infinite, Number Of Deaths And Rebirths.

We Are Prodding, Challenging, Seeking Contradictions Or Small, Persistent Residual Errors, Proposing Alternative Explanations, Encouraging Heresy. We Give Our Highest Rewards To Those Who Convincingly Disprove Established Beliefs.

It's Hard To Kill A Creature Once It Lets You See Its Consciousness.

We Invest Far Off Places With A Certain Romance... Long Summers, Mild Winters, Rich Harvests, Plentiful Game; None Of Them Lasts For Ever. Your Own Life, Or Your Bands, Or Even Your Species - Might Be Owed To A Restless Few, Drawn By A Craving They Can Hardly Articulate Or Understand, To Undiscovered Lands, And New Worlds.

Other Things Being Equal, It Is Better To Be Smart Than To Be Stupid.

Science Is Merely An Extremely Powerful Method Of Winnowing What's True From What Feels Good.

The Significance Of Our Lives And Our Fragile Planet Is Then Determined Only By Our Own Wisdom And Courage. We Are The Custodians Of Life's Meaning. We Long For A Parent To Care For Us, To Forgive Us Our Errors, To Save Us From Our Childish Mistakes. But Knowledge Is Preferable To Ignorance. Better By Far To Embrace The Hard Truth Than A Reassuring Fable. If We Crave Some Cosmic Purpose, Then Let Us Find Ourselves A Worthy Goal.

Humans - Who Enslave, Castrate, Experiment On, And Fillet Other Animals - Have Had An Understandable Penchant For Pretending Animals Do Not Feel Pain.

Virtually Every Major Technological Advance In The History Of The Human Species - Back To The Invention Of Stone Tools And The Domestication Of Fire - Has Been Ethically Ambiguous.

How Smart Does A Chimpanzee Have To Be Before Killing Him Constitutes Murder?

A Blade Of Grass Is A Commonplace On Earth; It Would Be A Miracle On Mars. Our Descendants On Mars Will Know The Value Of A Patch Of Green. And If A Blade Of Grass Is Priceless, What Is The Value Of A Human Being?

The Apollo Pictures Of The Whole Earth Conveyed To Multitudes Something Well Known To Astronomers: On The Scale Of The Worlds - To Say Nothing Of Stars Or Galaxies - Humans Are Inconsequential, A Thin Film Of Life On An Obscure And Solitary Lump Of Rock And Metal

We Are Like Butterflies Who Flutter For A Day And Think It Is Forever.

I Maintain There Is Much More Wonder In Science Than In Pseudoscience. And In Addition, To Whatever Measure This Term Has Any Meaning, Science Has The Additional Virtue, And It Is Not An Inconsiderable One, Of Being True.

Stars Are Phoenixes, Rising From Their Own Ashes.

Science Is Much More Than A Body Of Knowledge. It Is A Way Of Thinking. This Is Central To Its Success. Science Invites Us To Let The Facts In, Even When They Don't Conform To Our Preconceptions. It Counsels Us To Carry Alternative Hypotheses In Our Heads And See Which Ones Best Match The Facts. It Urges On Us A Fine Balance Between No-holds-barred Openness To New Ideas, However Heretical, And The Most Rigorous Skeptical Scrutiny Of Everything - New Ideas And Established Wisdom.

Our Loyalties Are To The Species And The Planet. We Speak For Earth.

Otherwise We Don't Run The Government The Government Runs Us

Frederick Douglas Taught That Literacy Is The Path From Slavery To Freedom. There Are Many Kinds Of Slavery And Many Kinds Of Freedom, But Reading Is Still The Path.

.. Think Of The Rivers Of Blood Spilled By All Those Generals And Emperors So That In Glory And In Triumph They Could Become The 'momentary' Masters Of A 'fraction' Of A 'dot'

For A Long Time The Human Instinct To Understand Was Thwarted By Facile Religious Explanations.

The Universe Forces Those Who Live In It To Understand It. Those Creatures Who Find Everyday Experience A Muddled Jumble Of Events With No Predictability, No Regularity, Are In Grave Peril. The Universe Belongs To Those Who, At Least To Some Degree, Have Figured It Out.

He Sought A Way To Preserve The Past. John Hershel Was One Of The Founders Of A New Form Of Time Travel.... A Means To Capture Light And Memories. He Actually Coined A Word For It... Photography. When You Think About It, Photography Is A Form Of Time Travel. This Man Is Staring At Us From Across The Centuries, A Ghost Preserved By Light.

The Passion To Explore Is At The Heart Of Being Human.

I Don't Want To Believe. I Want To Know.

It Is Clear That The Nations Of The World Now Can Only Rise And Fall Together. It Is Not A Question Of One Nation Winning At The Expense Of Another. We Must All Help One Another Or All Perish Together.

'in His Celebrated Book, 'on Liberty', The English Philosopher John Stuart Mill Argued That Silencing An Opinion Is "a Peculiar Evil." If The Opinion Is Right, We Are Robbed Of The "opportunity Of Exchanging Error For Truth"; And If It's Wrong, We Are Deprived Of A Deeper Understanding Of The Truth In Its "collision With Error." If We Know Only Our Own Side Of The Argument, We Hardly Know Even That: It Becomes Stale, Soon Learned By Rote, Untested, A Pallid And Lifeless Truth.'

Every Cell Is A Triumph Of Natural Selection, And We’re Made Of Trillions Of Cells. Within Us, Is A Little Universe.

If I Finish A Book A Week, I Will Read Only A Few Thousand Books In My Lifetime, About A Tenth Of A Percent Of The Contents Of The Greatest Libraries Of Our Time. The Trick Is To Know Which Books To Read.

Our Ancestors Lived Out Of Doors. They Were As Familiar With The Night Sky As Most Of Us Are With Our Favorite Television Programs.

Modern Science Has Been A Voyage Into The Unknown, With A Lesson In Humility Waiting At Every Stop. Many Passengers Would Rather Have Stayed Home.

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

The Words "question" And "quest" Are Cognates. Only Through Inquiry Can We Discover Truth.

We Have Begun To Contemplate Our Origins: Starstuff Pondering The Stars; Organized Assemblages Of Ten Billion Billion Billion Atoms Considering The Evolution Of Atoms; Tracing The Long Journey By Which, Here At Least, Consciousness Arose.

Which Aspects Of Our Nature Will Prevail Is Uncertain, Particularly When Our Visions And Prospects Are Bound To One Small Part Of The Small Planet Earth. But Up There In The Cosmos An Inescapable Perspective Awaits.

Real Patriots Ask Questions.

A Tiny Blue Dot Set In A Sunbeam. Here It Is. That's Where We Live. That's Home. We Humans Are One Species And This Is Our World. It Is Our Responsibility To Cherish It. Of All The Worlds In Our Solar System, The Only One So Far As We Know, Graced By Life.

The Understanding Of The Intent Of The Artist Which I Can Achieve When High Sometimes Carries Over To When I’m Down. This Is One Of Many Human Frontiers Which Cannabis Has Helped Me Traverse.

Few Scientists Now Dispute That Today's Soaring Levels Of Carbon Dioxide And Other Gases In The Atmosphere Will Cause Global Temperature Averages To Rise By As Much As Nine Degrees Fahrenheit Sometime After The Year 2000.

Science Is A Way Of Thinking Much More Than It Is A Body Of Knowledge.

Nobody Listens To Mathematicians.

The Visions We Offer Our Children Shape The Future. It _matters_ What Those Visions Are. Often They Become Self-fulfilling Prophecies. Dreams Are Maps.

But Nature Is Always More Subtle, More Intricate, More Elegant Than What We Are Able To Imagine.

[s]cience Has Itself Become A Kind Of Religion.

They (i. E., The Pythagoreans) Did Not Advocate The Free Confrontation Of Conflicting Points Of View. Instead, Like All Orthodox Religions, They Practised A Rigidity That Prevented Them From Correcting Their Errors.

All Over The World There Are Enormous Numbers Of Smart, Even Gifted, People Who Harbor A Passion For Science. But That Passion Is Unrequited. Surveys Suggest That Some 95% Of Americans Are "scientifically Illiterate." That's...the Same Fraction...of Slaves Who Were Illiterate Before The Civil War.

For All Our Failings, Despite Our Limitations And Fallibilities, We Humans Are Capable Of Greatness.

A General Problem With Much Of Western Theology In My View Is That The God Portrayed Is Too Small. It Is A God Of A Tiny World And Not A God Of A Galaxy Much Less Of A Universe.

The Cosmos Is Within Us. We Are Made Of Star Stuff

Before We Invented Civilization Our Ancestors Lived Mainly In The Open Out Under The Sky. Before We Devised Artificial Lights And Atmospheric Pollution And Modern Forms Of Nocturnal Entertainment We Watched The Stars. There Were Practical Calendar Reasons Of Course But There Was More To It Than That. Even Today The Most Jaded City Dweller Can Be Unexpectedly Moved Upon Encountering A Clear Night Sky Studded With Thousands Of Twinkling Stars. When It Happens To Me After All These Years It Still Takes My Breath Away.

For Myself, I Like A Universe That, Includes Much That Is Unknown And, At The Same Time, Much That Is Knowable. A Universe In Which Everything Is Known Would Be Static And Dull, As Boring As The Heaven Of Some Weak-minded Theologians. A Universe That Is Unknowable Is No Fit Place For A Thinking Being. The Ideal Universe For Us Is One Very Much Like The Universe We Inhabit. And I Would Guess That This Is Not Really Much Of A Coincidence.

The Brain Is Like A Muscle. When It Is In Use We Feel Very Good. Understanding Is Joyous.

My View Is That If There Is No Evidence For It, Then Forget About It. An Agnostic Is Somebody Who Doesn’t Believe In Something Until There Is Evidence For It, So I’m Agnostic.

One Of The Reasons For Its Success Is That Science Has A Built-in, Error-correcting Machinery At Its Very Heart. Some May Consider This An Overbroad Characterization, But To Me Every Time We Exercise Self-criticism, Every Time We Test Our Ideas Against The Outside World, We Are Doing Science. When We Are Self-indulgent And Uncritical, When We Confuse Hopes And Facts, We Slide Into Pseudoscience And Superstition.

The Impediment To Scientific Thinking Is Not, I Think, The Difficulty Of The Subject. Complex Intellectual Feats Have Been Mainstays Even Of Oppressed Cultures. Shamans, Magicians And Theologians Are Highly Skilled In Their Intricate And Arcane Arts. No, The Impediment Is Political And Hierarchical.

Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions.

Human History Can Be Viewed As A Slowly Dawning Awareness That We Are Members Of A Larger Group.

We Are, Each Of Us, A Multitude. Within Us Is A Little Universe.

But Down Deep, At The Molecular Heart Of Life We're Essentially Identical To Trees.

Even Through Your Hardest Days, Remember We Are All Made Of Stardust.

These Are All Cases Of Proved Or Presumptive Baloney. A Deception Arises, Sometimes Innocently But Collaboratively, Sometimes With Cynical Premeditation. Usually The Victim Is Caught Up In A Powerful Emotion -- Wonder, Fear, Greed, Grief. Credulous Acceptance Of Baloney Can Cost You Money; That's What P. T. Barnum Meant When He Said, 'there's A Sucker Born Every Minute.' But It Can Be Much More Dangerous Than That, And When Governments And Societies Lose The Capacity For Critical Thinking, The Results Can Be Catastrophic -- However Sympathetic We May Be To Those Who Have Bought The Baloney.

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Andie MacDowell

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