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I Have A Foreboding Of An America In My Children's Or Grandchildren's Time - [...] When Awesome Technological Powers Are In The Hands Of A Very Few, And No One Representing The Public Interest Can Even Grasp The Issues; When The People Have Lost The Ability To Set Their Own Agendas Or Knowledgeably Question Those In Authority; When, Clutching Our Crystals And Nervously Consulting Our Horoscopes, Our Critical Faculties In Decline, Unable To Distinguish Between What Feels Good And What’s True, We Slide, Almost Without Noticing, Back Into Superstition And Darkness.

-Carl Sagan

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I Have A Foreboding

Carl Sagan

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I Have A Foreboding Of An America In My Children's Or Grandchildren's Time - [...] When Awesome Technological Powers Are In The Hands Of A Very Few, And No One Representing The Public Interest Can Even Grasp The Issues; When The People Have Lost The Ability To Set Their Own Agendas Or Knowledgeably Question Those In Authority; When, Clutching Our Crystals And Nervously Consulting Our Horoscopes, Our Critical Faculties In Decline, Unable To Distinguish Between What Feels Good And What’s True, We Slide, Almost Without Noticing, Back Into Superstition And Darkness.

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Science Is More Than A Body Of Knowledge. It's A Way Of Thinking: A Way Of Skeptically Interrogating The Universe.

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

The Universe Seems Neither Benign Nor Hostile, Merely Indifferent.

Nothing Disturbs Me More Than The Glorification Of Stupidity.

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.

Better The Hard Truth, I Say, Than The Comforting Fantasy. And In The Final Tolling It Often Turns Out That The Facts Are More Comforting Than The Fantasy.

A Galaxy Is Composed Of Gas And Dust And Stars - Billions Upon Billions Of Stars. Every Star May Be A Sun To Someone.

Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Evidence

The Fact That Some Geniuses Were Laughed At Does Not Imply That All Who Are Laughed At Are Geniuses.

Not Explaining Science Seems To Me Perverse. When You're In Love, You Want To Tell The World.

Science Is A Way To Call The Bluff Of Those Who Only Pretend To Knowledge. It Is A Bulwark Against Mysticism, Against Superstition, Against Religion Misapplied To Where It Has No Business Being.

Extinction Is The Rule. Survival Is The Exception.

Mass Extinction

Exception To The Rule

One Trend That Bothers Me Is The Glorification Of Stupidity, That The Media Is Reassuring People It's Alright Not To Know Anything. That To Me Is Far More Dangerous Than A Little Pornography On The Internet.

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

Avoidable Human Misery Is More Often Caused Not So Much By Stupidity As By Ignorance, Particularly Our Ignorance About Ourselves.

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.

We Seem, These Days, Much More Willing To Recognize The Perils Before Us Than We Were Even A Decade Ago. The Newly Recognized Dangers Threaten All Of Us, Equally. No One Can Say How It Will Turn Out Down Here. But This Is Also, We May Note, The First Time That A Species Has Become Able To Journey To The Planets And The Stars. Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense A Stirring Of The Breeze.

But I Could Be Wrong.

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

It Is Of Interest To Note That While Some Dolphins Are Reported To Have Learned English - Up To Fifty Words Used In Correct Context - No Human Being Has Been Reported To Have Learned Dolphinese.

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

Theoretical Physics

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.

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 Hole In The Ozone Layer Is A Kind Of Skywriting. At First It Seemed To Spell Out Our Continuing Complacency Before A Witch's Brew Of Deadly Perils. But Perhaps It Really Tells Of A Newfound Talent To Work Together To Protect The Global Environment.

The Surface Of The Earth Is The Shore Of The Cosmic Ocean.

These Days There Seems To Be Nowhere Left To Explore, At Least On The Land Area Of The Earth. Victims Of Their Very Success, The Explorers Now Pretty Much Stay Home.

We Live On A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam

The Universe Is Not Required To Be In Perfect Harmony With Human Ambition.

Scientists Make Mistakes. Accordingly, It Is The Job Of The Scientist To Recognize Our Weakness, To Examine The Widest Range Of Opinions, To Be Ruthlessly Self-critical. Science Is A Collective Enterprise With The Error-correction Machinery Often Running Smoothly.

The Absence Of Evidence Is Not The Evidence Of Absence.

If We Are Not Able To Ask Skeptical Questions, To Interrogate Those Who Tell Us That Something Is True, To Be Skeptical Of Those In Authority, Then, We Are Up For Grabs For The Next Charlatan (political Or Religious) Who Comes Rambling Along.

A Stars Rich In Europium; Of Distant Galaxies Analyzed Through The Collective Light Of A Hundred Billion Constituent Stars. Astronomical Spectroscopy Is An Almost Magical Technique. It Amazes Me Still. Auguste Comte Picked A Particularly Unfortunate Example.

We Go About Our Daily Lives Understanding Almost Nothing Of The World.

We've Arranged A Civilization In Which Most Crucial Elements Profoundly Depend On Science And Technology.

We Are A Way Of The Universe Knowing Itself.

We Are Made Of Star-stuff. Our Bodies Are Made Of Star-stuff. There Are Pieces Of Star Within Us All.

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.

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

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

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.

Science Is Not Only Compatible With Spirituality; It Is A Profound Source Of Spirituality.

There Is Never Only One Of Anything In Nature.

Ask Courageous Questions. Do Not Be Satisfied With Superficial Answers. Be Open To Wonder And At The Same Time Subject All Claims To Knowledge, Without Exception, To Intense Skeptical Scrutiny. Be Aware Of Human Fallibility. Cherish Your Species And Your Planet.

Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known.

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There Is No Other Species On Earth That Does Science. It Is, So Far, Entirely A Human Invention, Evolved By Natural Selection In The Cerebral Cortex For One Simple Reason: It Works. It 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.

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

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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?

We Live In A Society Exquisitely Dependent On Science And Technology And Yet Have Cleverly Arranged Things So That Almost No One Understands Science And Technology.

Information Society

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.

Scientists Can Routinely Predict A Solar Eclipse, To The Minute, A Millennium In Advance. You Can Go To The Witch Doctor To Lift The Spell That Causes Your Pernicious Anaemia, Or You Can Take Vitamin B12. If You Want To Save Your Child From Polio, You Can Pray Or You Can Inoculate. If You're Interested In The Sex Of Your Unborn Child, You Can Consult Plumb-bob Danglers All You Want . . . But They'll Be Right, On Average, Only One Time In Two. If You Want Real Accuracy . . . Try Amniocentesis And Sonograms. Try Science.

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

After The Earth Dies, Some 5 Billion Years From Now, After It's Burned To A Crisp, Or Even Swallowed By The Sun, There Will Be Other Worlds And Stars And Galaxies Coming Into Being - And They Will Know Nothing Of A Place Once Called Earth.

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To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

How Is It That Hardly Any Major Religion Has Looked At Science And Concluded, “this Is Better Than We Thought! The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant?

The Fact That So Little Of The Findings Of Modern Science Is Prefigured In Scripture To My Mind Casts Further Doubt On It Divine Inspiration.

Valid Criticism Does You A Favor.

First Rule In Government Spending: Why Build One When You Can Have Two At Twice The Price?

We Live At A Moment When Our Relationships To Each Other, And To All Other Beings With Whom We Share This Planet, Are Up For Grabs.

Our Relationship

Cosmos Is A Greek Word For The Order Of The Universe. It Is, In A Way, The Opposite Of Chaos. It Implies The Deep Interconnectedness Of All Things. It Conveys Awe For The Intricate And Subtle Way In Which The Universe Is Put Together.

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.

The Cosmic Calendar Compresses The Local History Of The Universe Into A Single Year. If The Universe Began On January 1st It Was Not Until May That The Milky Way Formed. Other Planetary Systems May Have Appeared In June, July And August, But Our Sun And Earth Not Until Mid-september. Life Arose Soon After. 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.

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

A Proclivity For Science Is Embedded Deeply Within Us, In All Times, Places, And Cultures. It Has Been The Means For Our Survival. It Is Our Birthright. When, Through Indifference, Inattention, Incompetence, Or Fear Of Skepticism, We Discourage Children From Science, We Are Disenfranchisin G Them, Taking From Them The Tools Needed To Manage Their Future.

...the Idea Of A Spiritual Part Of Our Nature That Survives Death, The Notion Of An Afterlife, Ought To Be Easy For Religions And Nations To Sell. This Is Not An Issue Of Which We Might Anticipate Widespread Skepticism. People Will Want To Believe It, Even If The Evidence Is Meager To Nil... Compelling Testimony ... Provides That Our Personality, Character, Memory ... Resides In The Matter Of The Brain, It Is Easy Not To Focus On It, To Find Ways To Evade The Weight Of The Evidence.

There Is Perhaps No Better A Demonstration Of The Folly Of Human Conceits Than This Distant Image Of Our Tiny World.

Thus The Recent Rapid Evolution Of Human Intelligence Is Not Only The Cause Of But Also The Only Conceivable Solution To The Many Serious Problems That Beset Us.

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

The Nuclear Arms Race Is Like Two Sworn Enemies Standing Waist Deep In Gasoline, One With Three Matches, The Other With Five.

The Beauty Of A Living Thing Is Not The Atoms That Go Into It, But The Way Those Atoms Are Put Together. Information Distilled Over 4 Billion Years Of Biological Evolution. Incidentally, All The Organisms On The Earth Are Made Essentially Of That Stuff. An Eyedropper Full Of That Liquid Could Be Used To Make A Caterpillar Or A Petunia If Only We Knew How To Put The Components Together.

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

Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Proof.

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

The Claim Is Also Sometimes Made That Science Is As Arbitrary Or Irrational As All Other Claims To Knowledge, Or That Reason Itself Is An Illusion. As Ethan Allen Said Those Who Invalidate Reason Ought Seriously To Consider Whether They Argue Against Reason With Or Without Reason; If With Reason, Then They Establish The Principle That They Are Labouring To Dethrone. If They Argue Without Reason, Which They Must Do, In Order To Be Consistent With Themselves, They Are Out Of Reach Of Rational Conviction, Nor Do They Deserve A Rational Argument.

Advances In Medicine And Agriculture Have Saved Vastly More Lives Than Have Been Lost In All The Wars In History.

It Means Nothing To Be Open To A Proposition We Don't Understand.

In The Middle 1970s An Astronomer I Admire Put Together A Modest Manifesto Called "objections To Astrology" And Asked Me To Endorse It. I Struggled With His Wording, And In The End Found Myself Unable To Sign, Not Because I Thought Astrology Has Any Validity Whatever, But Because I Felt (and Still Feel) That The Tone Of The Statement Was Authoritarian.

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.

Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense The Stirring Of A Breeze.

We Are Rare And Precious Because We Are Alive, Because We Can Think As Well As We Can. We Are Privileged To Influence And Perhaps Control Our Future. I Believe We Have An Obligation To Fight For Life On Earth - Not Just For Ourselves, But For All Those, Humans And Others, Who Came Before Us, And To Whom We Are Beholden, And For All Those Who, If We Are Wise Enough, Will Come After.

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

War Is Murder Writ Large.

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

I Find Science So Much More Fascinating Than Science Fiction. It Also Has The Advantage Of Being True.

[kepler] Preferred The Hard Truth To His Dearest Illusions, And That Is The Heart Of Science.

Humans Are Very Good At Dreaming, Although You'd Never Know It From Your Television.

Present Global Culture Is A Kind Of Arrogant Newcomer. It Arrives On The Planetary Stage Following Four And A Half Billion Years Of Other Acts, And After Looking About For A Few Thousand Years Declares Itself In Possession Of Eternal Truths. But In A World That Is Changing As Fast As Ours, This Is A Prescription For Disaster. No Nation, No Religion, No Economic System, No Body Of Knowledge, Is Likely To Have All The Answers For Our Survival. There Must Be Many Social Systems That Would Work Far Better Than Any Now In Existence. In The Scientific Tradition, Our Task Is To Find Them.

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.

That We Can Now Think Of No Mechanism For Astrology Is Relevant But Unconvincing. No Mechanism Was Known, For Example, For Continental Drift When It Was Proposed By Wegener. Nevertheless, We See That Wegener Was Right, And Those Who Objected On The Grounds Of Unavailable Mechanism Were Wrong.

One Of The Great Commandments Of Science Is: 'mistrust Arguments From Authority.'

Science Is A Way Of Thinking Much More Than It Is A Body Of Knowledge. Its Goal Is To Find Out How The World Works, To Seek What Regularities There May Be, To Penetrate To The Connections Of Things-from Subatomic Particles, Which May Be The Constituents Of All Matter, To Living Organisms, The Human Social Community, And Thence To The Cosmos As A Whole.

In The Way That Scepticism Is Sometimes Applied To Issues Of Public Concern, There Is A Tendency To Belittle, To Condescend, To Ignore The Fact That, Deluded Or Not, Supporters Of Superstition And Pseudoscience Are Human Beings With Real Feelings, Who, Like The Sceptics, Are Trying To Figure Out How The World Works And What Our Role In It Might Be. Their Motives Are In Many Cases Consonant With Science. If Their Culture Has Not Given Them All The Tools They Need To Pursue This Great Quest, Let Us Temper Our Criticism With Kindness. None Of Us Comes Fully Equipped.

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.

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

I Don?t Feel Rejected By The Sky. I?m A Part Of It- Tiny, To Be Sure, But Everything Is Tiny Compared To That Overwhelming Immensity.

I’m Struck Again By The Irony That Spaceflight-conceived In The Cauldron Of Nationalist Rivalries And Hatreds-brings With It A Stunning Transnational Vision. You Spend Even A Little Time Contemplating The Earth From Orbit And The Most Deeply Engrained Nationalisms Begin To Erode. They Seem The Squabbles Of Mites On A Plum.

If We Could Travel Into The Past, It's Mind-boggling What Would Be Possible. For One Thing, History Would Become An Experimental Science, Which It Certainly Isn't Today. The Possible Insights Into Our Own Past And Nature And Origins Would Be Dazzling. For Another, We Would Be Facing The Deep Paradoxes Of Interfering With The Scheme Of Causality That Has Led To Our Own Time And Ourselves. I Have No Idea Whether It's Possible, But It's Certainly Worth Exploring.

There Are Many Instances In Science, Where Those Closest To The Intricacies Of The Subject Have A More Highly Developed Sense Of Its Intractability Than Those At Some Remove. On The Other Hand, Those At Too Great A Distance May, I Am Well Aware, Mistake Ignorance For Perspective.

We've Begun At Last To Wonder About Our Origins, Star Stuff Contemplating The Stars, Organized Collections Of Ten Billion Billion Billion Atoms Contemplating The Evolution Of Matter, Tracing That Long Path By Which It Arrived At Consciousness Here On The Planet Earth And Perhaps Throughout The Cosmos. Our Obligation To Survive And Flourish Is Owed Not Just To Ourselves But Also To That Cosmos, Ancient And Vast, From Which We Spring.

I Think The Health Of Our Civilization, The Depth Of Our Awareness About The Underpinnings Of Our Culture, And Our Concern For The Future, Can All Be Tested By How Well We Support Our Libraries.

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.

If God Is Omnipotent And Omniscient, Why Didn't He Start The Universe Out In The First Place So It Would Come Out The Way He Wants? Why's He Constantly Repairing And Complaining? No, There's One Thing The Bible Makes Clear: The Biblical God Is A Sloppy Manufacturer. He's Not Good At Design, He's Not Good At Execution. He'd Be Out Of Business, If There Was Any Competition.

It Does No Harm To The Romance Of The Sunset To Know A Little Bit About It.

In Our Time, We Have Sifted The Sands Of Mars, We Have Established A Presence There, We Have Fulfilled A Century Of Dreams!

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.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is.

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

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.

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

We Are, In A Way, Temporary Ambulatory Repositories For Our Nucleic Acids. This Does Not Deny Our Humanity; It Does Not Prevent Us From Pursuing The Good, The True And The Beautiful. But It Would Be A Great Mistake To Ignore Where We Have Come From In Our Attempt To Determine Where We Are Going.

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

The Cannabis Experience Has Greatly Improved My Appreciation For Art, A Subject Which I Had Never Much Appreciated Before.

Science Is Not Perfect. It's Often Misused; It's Only A Tool, But It's The Best Tool We Have. Self-correcting , Ever Changing, Applicable To Everything: With This Tool, We Vanquish The Impossible.

If We Long To Believe That The Stars Rise And Set For Us, That We Are The Reason There Is A Universe, Does Science Do Us A Disservice In Deflating Our Conceits?

Any Faith That Admires Truth, That Strives To Know God, Must Be Brave Enough To Accommodate The Universe.

The Method Of Science, As Stodgy And Grumpy As It May Seem, Is Far More Important Than The Findings Of Science.

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

All Of The Books In The World Contain No More Information Than Is Broadcast As Video In A Single Large American City In A Single Year. Not All Bits Have Equal Value.

The Visions We Offer Our Children Shape The Future.

There Is Much That Science Doesn't Understand, Many Mysteries Still To Be Resolved. In A Universe Tens Of Billions Of Light-years Across And Some Ten Or Fifteen Billion Years Old, This May Be The Case Forever. We Are Constantly Stumbling On New Surprises

You Can't Convince A Believer Of Anything; For Their Belief Is Not Based On Evidence, It's Based On A Deep Seated Need To Believe

But, Jefferson Worried That The People - And The Argument Goes Back To Thucydides And Aristotle - Are Easily Misled. He Also Stressed, Passionately And Repeatedly, That It Was Essential For The People To Understand The Risks And Benefits Of Government, To Educate Themselves, And To Involve Themselves In The Political Process. Without That, He Said, The Wolves Will Take Over.

Books Permit Us To Voyage Through Time, To Tap The Wisdom Of Our Ancestors.

Has There Ever Been A Religion With The Prophetic Accuracy And Reliability Of Science? . . . No Other Human Institution Comes Close.

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

Knowing A Great Deal Is Not The Same As Being Smart; Intelligence Is Not Information Alone But Also Judgement, The Manner In Which Information Is Coordinated And Used.

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

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.

Science Arouses A Soaring Sense Of Wonder. But So Does Pseudoscience. Sparse And Poor Popularizations Of Science Abandon Ecological Niches That Pseudoscience Promptly Fills. If It Were Widely Understood That Claims To Knowledge Require Adequate Evidence Before They Can Be Accepted, There Would Be No Room For Pseudoscience.

If The Press Descended, The Science Would Surely Suffer.

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.

We Are The Product Of 4.5 Billion Years Of Fortuitous, Slow Biological Evolution. There Is No Reason To Think That The Evolutionary Process Has Stopped. Man Is A Transitional Animal. He Is Not The Climax Of Creation.

We Should Be Teaching Our Children The Scientific Method And The Reasons For A Bill Of Rights. With It Comes A Certain Decency, Humility And Community Spirit.

Looking At Fires When High, By The Way, Especially Through One Of Those Prism Kaleidoscopes Which Image Their Surroundings, Is An Extraordinarily Moving And Beautiful Experience.

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.

Observation: I Can't See A Thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still.

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

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.

When A Honeybee Dies It Releases A Death Pheromone, A Characteristic Odour That Signals The Survivors To Remove It From The Hive. The Corpse Is Promptly Pushed And Tugged Out Of The Hive. The Death Pheromone Is Oleic Acid. What Happens If A Live Bee Is Dabbed With A Drop Of Oleic Acid? Then No Matter How Strapping And Vigourous It Might Be, It Is Carried Kicking And Screaming Out Of The Hive.

Where We Have Strong Emotions, We're Liable To Fool Ourselves.

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, And Albert Einstein Made Serious Mistakes. But The Scientific Enterprise Arranges Things So That Teamwork Prevails: What One Of Us, Even The Most Brilliant Among Us, Misses, Another Of Us, Even Someone Much Less Celebrated And Capable, May Detect And Rectify.

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

The Size And Age Of The Cosmos Are Beyond Ordinary Human Understanding. Lost Somewhere Between Immensity And Eternity Is Our Tiny Planetary Home.

The Fact That Someone Says Something Doesn't Mean It's True. Doesn't Mean They're Lying, But It Doesn't Mean It's True.

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

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

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

We All Have A Thirst For Wonder. It's A Deeply Human Quality. Science And Religion Are Both Bound Up With It. What I'm Saying Is, You Don't Have To Make Stories Up, You Don't Have To Exaggerate. There's Wonder And Awe Enough In The Real World. Nature's A Lot Better At Inventing Wonders Than We Are.

We Are Star Stuff Which Has Taken Its Destiny Into Its Own Hands. The Loom Of Time And Space Works The Most Astonishing Transformations Of Matter.

Who Are We, If Not Measured By Our Impact On Others? That’s Who We Are! We’re Not Who We Say We Are, We’re Not Who We Want To Be - We Are The Sum Of The Influence And Impact That We Have, In Our Lives, On Others.

It Goes With A Courageous Intent To Greet The Universe As It Really Is, Not To Foist Our Emotional Predispositions On It But To Courageously Accept What Our Explorations Tell Us.

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.

We Were Wanderers From The Beginning.

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.

I Never Said It. Honest. Oh, I Said There Are Maybe 100 Billion Galaxies And 10 Billion Trillion Stars. It's Hard To Talk About The Cosmos Without Using Big Numbers. I Said "billion" Many Times On The Cosmos Television Series, Which Was Seen By A Great Many People. But I Never Said "billions And Billions." For One Thing, It's Too Imprecise. How Many Billions Are "billions And Billions"? A Few Billion? Twenty Billion? A Hundred Billion? "billions And Billions" Is Pretty Vague. When We Reconfigured And Updated The Series, I Checked-and Sure Enough, I Never Said It.

Perhaps The Depth Of Love Can Be Calibrated By The Number Of Different Selves That Are Actively Involved In A Given Relationship.

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?"

With Insufficient Data It Is Easy To Go Wrong.

It Would Be Wryly Interesting If In Human History The Cultivation Of Marijuana Led Generally To The Invention Of Agriculture, And Thereby To Civilization.

We Are, In The Most Profound Sense, Children Of The Cosmos.

Where Did God Come From? If We Decide This Is An Unanswerable Question Why Not Save A Step And Conclude That The Origin Of The Universe Is An Unanswerable Question.

My Fundamental Premise About The Brain Is That Its Workings - What We Sometimes Call "mind" - Are A Consequence Of Its Anatomy And Physiology, And Nothing More.

Anatomy And Physiology

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.

The Earth Is The Only World Known So Far To Harbor Life. There Is Nowhere Else, At Least In The Near Future, To Which Our Species Could Migrate. Visit, Yes. Settle, Not Yet. Like It Or Not, For The Moment The Earth Is Where We Make Our Stand. It Has Been Said That Astronomy Is A Humbling And Character-building Experience..... To Me, It Underscores Our Responsibility To Deal More Kindly With One Another, And To Preserve And Cherish The Pale Blue Dot, The Only Home We've Ever Known.

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.

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

If We Are Merely Matter Intricately Assembled, Is This Really Demeaning? If There's Nothing Here But Atoms, Does That Make Us Less Or Does That Make Matter More?

Except For Fools And Madmen, Everyone Knows That Nuclear War Would He An Unprecedented Human Catastrophe.

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

The Lifetime Of A Human Being Is Measured By Decades, The Lifetime Of The Sun Is A Hundred Million Times Longer. Compared To A Star, We Are Like Mayflies, Fleeting Ephemeral Creatures Who Live Out Their Lives In The Course Of A Single Day.

The Surface Of The Earth Is The Shore Of The Cosmic Ocean. On This Shore, We've Learned Most Of What We Know. Recently, We've Waded A Little Way Out, Maybe Ankle-deep, And The Water Seems Inviting. Some Part Of Our Being Knows This Is Where We Came From. We Long To Return, And We Can, Because The Cosmos Is Also Within Us. We're Made Of Star Stuff. We Are A Way For The Cosmos To Know Itself.

She Had Studied The Universe All Her Life, But Had Overlooked Its Clearest Message: For Small Creatures Such As We The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love.

Small Creatures

Teller Contended, Not Implausibly, That Hydrogen Bombs Keep The Peace, Or At Least Prevent Thermonuclear War, Because The Consequences Of Warfare Between Nuclear Powers Are Now Too Dangerous. We Haven't Had A Nuclear War Yet, Have We? But All Such Arguments Assume That The Nuclear-armed Nations Are And Always Will Be, Without Exception, Rational Actors, And That Bouts Of Anger And Revenge And Madness Will Never Overtake Their Leaders (or Military And Secret Police Officers In Charge Of Nuclear Weapons). In The Century Of Hitler And Stalin, This Seems Ingenuous.

Human Beings Grew Up In Forests; We Have A Natural Affinity For Them. How Lovely A Tree Is, Straining Toward The Sky.

If We Are To Survive, Our Loyalties Must Be Broadened Further, To Include The Whole Human Community, The Entire Planet Earth.

Real Patriots Ask Questions.

Science Is An Attempt, Largely Successful, To Understand The World, To Get A Grip On Things, To Get Hold Of Ourselves, To Steer A Safe Course. Microbiology And Meteorology Now Explain What Only A Few Centuries Ago Was Considered Sufficient Cause To Burn Women To Death.

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?

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.

Recent Research Shows That Many Children Without Enough To Eat Wind Up With Diminished Capacity To Understand And Learn (“cognitive Impairment” ). Children Don't Have To Be Starving For This To Happen. Even Mild Undernourishment — The Kind Most Common Among Poor People In America — Can Do It.

There Are Huge Advertising Budgets Only When There's No Difference Between The Products. If The Products Really Were Different, People Would Buy The One That's Better. Advertising Teaches People Not To Trust Their Judgment. Advertising Teaches People To Be Stupid.

Across The Sea Of Space, The Stars Are Other Suns.

An Atheist Is Someone Who Is Certain That God Does Not Exist, Someone Who Has Compelling Evidence Against The Existence Of God. I Know Of No Such Compelling Evidence.

Not All Birds Can Fly. What Separates The Flyers From The Walkers Is The Ability To Take Off.

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.

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.

When Permitted To Listen To Alternative Opinions And Engage In Substantive Debate, People Have Been Known To Change Their Minds. It Can Happen.

There Are Lots Of Ways To Communicate What We Know, But Few Ways To Communicate What We Feel. Music Is One Way To Communicate Emotions.

To Live In The Hearts Of Others Is To Never Die In Those We Leave Behind.

A Religion Old Or New, That Stressed The Magnificence Of The Universe As Revealed By Modern Science, Might Be Able To Draw Forth Reserves Of Reverence And Awe Hardly Tapped By The Conventional Faiths. Sooner Or Later Such A Religion Will Emerge.

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.

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.

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.

There Is A Reward Structure In Science That Is Very Interesting: Our Highest Honors Go To Those Who Disprove The Findings Of The Most Revered Among Us. So Einstein Is Revered Not Just Because He Made So Many Fundamental Contributions To Science, But Because He Found An Imperfection In The Fundamental Contribution Of Isaac Newton.

Coal, Oil And Gas Are Called Fossil Fuels, Because They Are Mostly Made Of The Fossil Remains Of Beings From Long Ago. The Chemical Energy Within Them Is A Kind Of Stored Sunlight Originally Accumulated By Ancient Plants. Our Civilization Runs By Burning The Remains Of Humble Creatures Who Inhabited The Earth Hundreds Of Millions Of Years Before The First Humans Came On The Scene. Like Some Ghastly Cannibal Cult, We Subsist On The Dead Bodies Of Our Ancestors And Distant Relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan

If You Wish To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch, You Must First Invent The Universe.

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