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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.

-Carl Sagan

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In The Middle 1970s

Carl Sagan

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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.

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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.

National Boundaries Are Not Evident When We View The Earth From Space. Fanatical Ethnic Or Religious Or National Chauvinisms Are A Little Difficult To Maintain When We See Our Planet As A Fragile Blue Crescent Fading To Become An Inconspicuous Point Of Light Against The Bastion And Citadel Of The Stars.

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

Preserve And Cherish The Pale Blue Dot, The Only Home We've Ever Known.

For All I Know We May Be Visited By A Different Extraterrestrial Civilization Every Second Tuesday, But There's No Support For This Appealing Idea. The Extraordinary Claims Are Not Supported By Extraordinary Evidence.

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

Centuries Hence, When Current Social And Political Problems May Seem As Remote As The Problems Of The Thirty Years' War Are To Us, Our Age May Be Remembered Chiefly For One Fact: It Was The Time When The Inhabitants Of The Earth First Made Contact With The Vast Cosmos In Which Their Small Planet Is Embedded.

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

If We Can't Think For Ourselves, If We're Unwilling To Question Authority, Then We're Just Putty In The Hands Of Those In Power. But If The Citizens Are Educated And Form Their Own Opinions, Then Those In Power Work For Us. In Every Country, 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. In The Demon-haunted World That We Inhabit By Virtue Of Being Human, This May Be All That Stands Between Us And The Enveloping Darkness.

Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Evidence

In Italy, The Inquisition Was Condemning People To Death Until The End Of The Eighteenth Century, And Inquisitional Torture Was Not Abolished In The Catholic Church Until 1816. The Last Bastion Of Support For The Reality Of Witchcraft And The Necessity Of Punishment Has Been The Christian Churches.

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.

Nevertheless, (jefferson) Believed That The Habit Of Skepticism Is An Essential Prerequisite For Responsible Citizenship. He Argued That The Cost Of Education Is Trivial Compared To The Cost Of Ignorance, Of Leaving Government To The Wolves. He Taught That The Country Is Safe Only When The People Rule.

The Fossil Record Implies Trial And Error, An Inability To Anticipate The Future, Features Inconsistent With An Efficient Great Designer (although Not With A Designer Of A More Remote And Indirect Temperament)

Trial And Error

Science Is Based On Experiment, On A Willingness To Challenge Old Dogma, On An Openness To See The Universe As It Really Is. Accordingly, Science Sometimes Requires Courage - At The Very Least The Courage To Question The Conventional Wisdom.

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

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.

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.

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

Societies Will, Of Course, Wish To Exercise Prudence In Deciding Which Technologies That Is, Which Applications Of Science Are To Be Pursued And Which Not. But Without Funding Basic Research, Without Supporting The Acquisition Of Knowledge For Its Own Sake, Our Options Become Dangerously Limited.

Probably A Dozen Times Since Their Death I've Heard My Mother Or Father, In An Ordinary Conversational Tone Of Voice, Call My Name. They Had Called My Name Often During My Life With Them ... It Doesn't Seem Strange To Me.

But Amid Much Elegance And Precision, The Details Of Life And The Universe Also Exhibit Haphazard, Jury-rigged Arrangements And Much Poor Planning. What Shall We Make Of This: An Edifice Abandoned Early In Construction By The Architect?

Details Of Life

Books Are Key To Understanding The World And Participating In A Democratic Society.

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.

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.

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.

What's The Harm Of A Little Mystification? It Sure Beats Boring Statistical Analyses.

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.

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.

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

You Mean Am I For It Or Against It? You Think This Is A Key Question I'm Going To Be Asked On Vega, And You Want To Make Sure I Give The Right Answer? Okay. Overpopulation Is Why I'm In Favor Of Homosexuality And A Celibate Clergy. A Celibate Clergy Is An Especially Good Idea, Because It Tends To Suppress Any Hereditary Propensity Toward Fanaticism.

For All Our Conceits About Being The Center Of The Universe, We Live In A Routine Planet Of A Humdrum Star Stuck Away In An Obscure Corner ... On An Unexceptional Galaxy Which Is One Of About 100 Billion Galaxies. ... That Is The Fundamental Fact Of The Universe We Inhabit, And It Is Very Good For Us To Understand That.

Modern Darwinism Makes It Abundantly Clear That Many Less Ruthless Traits, Some Not Always Admired By Robber Barons And Fuhrers - Altruism, General Intelligence, Compassion - May Be The Key To Survival.

The Politicians And The Religious Leaders And The Weapons Scientists Have Been At It For A Long Time And They've Made A Thorough Mess Of It. I Mean, We're In Deep Trouble.

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?

You're Capable Of Such Beautiful Dreams And Such Horrible Nightmares.

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 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.

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

We've Tended In Our Cosmologies To Make Things Familiar. Despite All Our Best Efforts, We've Not Been Very Inventive. In The West, Heaven Is Placid And Fluffy, And Hell Is Like The Inside Of A Volcano. In Many Stories, Both Realms Are Governed By Dominance Hierarchies Headed By Gods Or Devils. Monotheists Talked About The King Of Kings. In Every Culture We Imagined Something Like Our Own Political System Running The Universe. Few Found The Similarity Suspicious.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Worry That, Especially As The Millennium Edges Nearer, Pseudo-science And Superstition Will Seem Year By Year More Tempting, The Siren Song Of Unreason More Sonorous And Attractive.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Eratosthenes's Only Tools Were Sticks, Eyes, Feet, And Brains; Plus A Zest For Experiment. With Those Tools He Correctly Deduced The Circumference Of The Earth, To High Precision, With An Error Of Only A Few Percent. That's Pretty Good Figuring For 2200 Years Ago.

If We Can't Think For Ourselves, If We're Unwilling To Question Authority, Then We're Just Putty In The Hands Of Those In Power.

Scientific Method

The Suppression Of Uncomfortable Ideas May Be Common In Religion Or In Politics, But It Is Not The Path To Knowledge, And There's No Place For It In The Endeavor Of Science. We Do Not Know Beforehand Where Fundamental Insights Will Arise From About Our Mysterious And Lovely Solar System. The History Of Our Study Of Our Solar System Shows Us Clearly That Accepted And Conventional Ideas Are Often Wrong, And That Fundamental Insights Can Arise From The Most Unexpected Sources.

The Sacred Truth Of Science Is That There Are No Sacred Truths.

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.

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.

Cutting Off Fundamental, Curiosity-driven Science Is Like Eating The Seed Corn. We May Have A Little More To Eat Next Winter But What Will We Plant So We And Our Children Will Have Enough To Get Through The Winters To Come?

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.

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.

Science Is Only A Latin Word For Knowledge

The Nitrogen In Our Dna, The Calcium In Our Teeth, The Iron In Our Blood, The Carbon In Our Apple Pies Were Made In The Interiors Of Collapsing Stars. We Are Made Of Starstuff.

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.

There Are More Potential Combinations Of Dna [physical Forms] Than There Are Atoms In The Universe.

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

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?

I Am Often Amazed At How Much More Capability And Enthusiasm For Science There Is Among Elementary School Youngsters Than Among College Students.

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.

In The Fabric Of Space And In The Nature Of Matter, As In A Great Work Of Art, There Is, Written Small, The Artist's Signature.

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.

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

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

We Were Wanderers From The Beginning.

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.

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

It Is Sometimes Said That Scientists Are Unromantic, That Their Passion To Figure Out Robs The World Of Beauty And Mystery. But Is It Not Stirring To Understand How The World Actually Works — That White Light Is Made Of Colors, That Color Is The Way We Perceive The Wavelengths Of Light, That Transparent Air Reflects Light, That In So Doing It Discriminates Among The Waves, And That The Sky Is Blue For The Same Reason That The Sunset Is Red? It Does No Harm To The Romance Of The Sunset To Know A Little Bit About It.

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

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.

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

[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.

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.

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

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

The Universe Is A Pretty Big Place. If It's Just Us, Seems Like An Awful Waste Of Space.

Imagine A Room Awash In Gasoline, And There Are Two Implacable Enemies In That Room. One Of Them Has Nine Thousand Matches. The Other Has Seven Thousand Matches. Each Of Them Is Concerned About Who's Ahead, Who's Stronger. Well That's The Kind Of Situation We Are Actually In. The Amount Of Weapons That Are Available To The United States And The Soviet Union Are So Bloated, So Grossly In Excess Of What's Needed To Dissuade The Other, That If It Weren't So Tragic, It Would Be Laughable. What Is Necessary Is To Reduce The Matches And To Clean Up The Gasoline.

If We Continue To Accumulate Only Power And Not Wisdom, We Will Surely Destroy Ourselves.

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

In Many Cultures It Is Customary To Answer That God Created The Universe Out Of Nothing. But This Is Mere Temporizing. If We Wish Courageously To Pursue The Question, We Must, Of Course Ask Next Where God Comes From? And If We Decide This To Be Unanswerable, Why Not Save A Step And Conclude That The Universe Has Always Existed?

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.

We Are...capable Of Using Our Compassion And Our Intelligence, Our Technology And Our Wealth, To Make An Abundant And Meaningful Life For Every Inhabitant Of This Planet. To Enhance Enormously Our Understanding Of The Universe, And To Carry Us To The Stars.

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.

One Of The Great Commandments Of Science Is, 'mistrust Arguments From Authority'. (scientists, Being Primates, And Thus Given To Dominance Hierarchies, Of Course Do Not Always Follow This Commandment.)

I Would Suggest That Science Is, At Least In My Part, Informed Worship.

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

We Wish To Find The Truth, No Matter Where It Lies. But To Find The Truth We Need Imagination And Skepticism Both. We Will Not Be Afraid To Speculate, But We Will Be Careful To Distinguish Speculation From Fact.

You're An Interesting Species, An Interesting Mix. You're Capable Of Such Beautiful Dreams And Such Horrible Nightmares. You Feel So Lost, So Cut Off, So Alone, Only You're Not. See, In All Our Searching, The Only Thing We've Found That Makes The Emptiness Bearable Is Each Other.

As Agonizing A Disease As Cancer Is, I Do Not Think It Can Be Said That Our Civilization Is Threatened By It. ... But A Very Plausible Case Can Be Made That Our Civilization Is Fundamentally Threatened By The Lack Of Adequate Fertility Control. Exponential Increases Of Population Will Dominate Any Arithmetic Increases, Even Those Brought About By Heroic Technological Initiatives, In The Availability Of Food And Resources, As Malthus Long Ago Realized.

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.

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 All Made Up Of Star Stuff.

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.

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.

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

By Looking Far Out Into Space We Are Also Looking Far Back Into Time, Back Toward The Horizon Of The Universe, Back Toward The Epoch Of The Big Bang.

(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.

Many Religions Have Attempted To Make Statues Of Their Gods Very Large, And The Idea, I Suppose, Is To Make Us Feel Small. But If That's Their Purpose, They Can Keep Their Paltry Icons. We Need Only Look Up If We Wish To Feel Small.

Any Civilization That Doesn't Develop Space Travel Dies.

We Have Entered, Almost Without Noticing, An Age Of Exploration And Discovery Unparalleled Since The Renaissance.

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

Cleverly Designed Experiments Are The Key.

The Absence Of Evidence Is Not The Evidence Of Absence.

Our Concern For The Future Can Be Tested By How Well We Support Our Libraries.

Extraordinary Observations Require Extraordinary Evidence To Make Them Believable.

The Near Side Of A Galaxy Is Tens Of Thousands Of Light-years Closer To Us Than The Far Side; Thus We See The Front As It Was Tens Of Thousands Of Years Before The Back. But Typical Events In Galactic Dynamics Occupy Tens Of Millions Of Years, So The Error In Thinking Of An Image Of A Galaxy As Frozen In One Moment Of Time Is Small.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Platonists And Their Christian Successors Held The Peculiar Notion That The Earth Was Tainted And Somehow Nasty, While The Heavens Were Perfect And Divine. The Fundamental Idea That The Earth Is A Planet, That We Are Citizens Of The Universe, Was Rejected And Forgotten.

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

Man Is A Transitional Animal. He Is Not The Climax Of Creation

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

Every Star May Be A Sun To Someone.

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

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.

You Have To Know The Past To Understand The Present.

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

The Chief Deficiency I See In The Skeptical Movement Is Its Polarization: Us Vs. Them - The Sense That We Have A Monopoly On The Truth; That Those Other People Who Believe In All These Stupid Doctrines Are Morons; That If You're Sensible, You'll Listen To Us; And If Not, To Hell With You. This Is Nonconstructive. It Does Not Get Our Message Across. It Condemns Us To Permanent Minority Status.

Scientists Constantly Get Clobbered With The Idea That We Spent 27 Billion Dollars On The Apollo Programs, And Are Asked "what More Do You Want?" We Didn't Spend It; It Was Done For Political Reasons. ... Apollo Was A Response To The Bay Of Pigs Fiasco And To The Successful Orbital Flight Of Yuri Gagarin. President Kennedy's Objective Was Not To Find Out The Origin Of The Moon By The End Of The Decade; Rather It Was To Put A Man On The Moon And Bring Him Back, And We Did That.

The Values Of Science And The Values Of Democracy Are Concordant, In Many Cases Indistinguishable. Science And Democracy Began - In Their Civilized Incarnations - In The Same Time And Place, Greece In The Seventh And Sixth Centuries B.c. . . . Science Thrives On, Indeed Requires, The Free Exchange Of Ideas; Its Values Are Antithetical To Secrecy. Science Holds To No Special Vantage Points Or Privileged Positions. Both Science And Democracy Encourage Unconventional Opinions And Vigorous Debate. Both Demand Adequate Reason, Coherent Argument, Rigorous Standards Of Evidence And Honesty.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is.

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.

[n]o Scientist Likes To Be Criticized. ... But You Don't Reply To Critics: "wait A Minute, Wait A Minute; This Is A Really Good Idea. I'm Very Fond Of It. It's Done You No Harm. Please Don't Attack It." That's Not The Way It Goes. The Hard But Just Rule Is That If The Ideas Don't Work, You Must Throw Them Away. Don't Waste Any Neurons On What Doesn't Work. Devote Those Neurons To New Ideas That Better Explain The Data. Valid Criticism Is Doing You A Favor.

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

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

If You Are Only Skeptical, Then No New Ideas Make It Through To You. You Become A Crotchety Old Person Convinced That Nonsense Is Ruling The World. (there Is, Of Course, Much Data To Support You.) But Every Now And Then, A New Idea Turns Out To Be On The Mark, Valid And Wonderful. If You Are Too Much In The Habit Of Being Skeptical About Everything, You Are Going To Miss Or Resent It, And Either Way You Will Be Standing In The Way Of Understanding And Progress.

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

You Could Just As Well Say That An Agnostic Is A Deeply Religious Person With At Least A Rudimentary Knowledge Of Human Fallibility.

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.

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.

To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

What Counts Is Not What Sounds Plausible, Not What We Would Like To Believe, Not What One Or Two Witnesses Claim, But Only What Is Supported By Hard Evidence Rigorously And Skeptically Examined. Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

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.

We Are The Universe Experiencing Itself.

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

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.

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?

The Illegality Of Cannabis Is Outrageous, An Impediment To Full Utilization Of A Drug Which Helps Produce The Serenity And Insight, Sensitivity And Fellowship So Desperately Needed In This Increasingly Mad And Dangerous World.

Dangerous World

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.

We Can't Help It. Life Looks For Life.

Every One Of Us Is, In The Cosmic Perspective, Precious. If A Human Disagrees With You, Let Him Live. In A Hundred Billion Galaxies, You Will Not Find Another.

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.

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

A Multitude Of Aspects Of The Natural World That Were Considered Miraculous Only A Few Generations Ago Are Now Thoroughly Understood In Terms Of Physics And Chemistry.

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.

Our Species Needs, And Deserves, A Citizenry With Minds Wide Awake And A Basic Understanding Of How The World Works.

If The Greenhouse Effect Is A Blanket In Which We Wrap Ourselves To Keep Warm, Nuclear Winter Kicks The Blanket Off.

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

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.

Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions.

We Are Made Of Star Stuff. For The Most Part, Atoms Heavier Than Hydrogen Were Created In The Interiors Of Stars And Then Expelled Into Space To Be Incorporated Into Later Stars. The Sun Is Probably A Third Generation Star.

Nature Does Not Always Conform To Our Predispositions And Preferences, To What We Deem Comfortable And Easy To Understand.

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.

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

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.

Writing A Novel Is Like Trying To Solve A Very Long Mathematical Equation. Changing Anything Can Change Everything Else.

Mathematical Equations

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.

The Dumbing Down Of American Is Most Evident In The Slow Decay Of Substantive Content In The Enormously Influential Media, The 30 Second Sound Bites (now Down To 10 Seconds Or Less), Lowest Common Denominator Programming, Credulous Presentations On Pseudoscience And Superstition, But Especially A Kind Of Celebration Of Ignorance.

The Illegality Of Cannabis Is Outrageous.

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. . . .

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.

Our Passion For Learning ... Is Our Tool For Survival.

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.

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.

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

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

I Think If We Ever Reach The Point Where We Think We Thoroughly Understand Who We Are And Where We Came From, We Will Have Failed.

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

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.

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.

If We Teach Only The Findings And Products Of Science - No Matter How Useful And Even Inspiring They May Be - Without Communicating Its Critical Method, How Can The Average Person Possibly Distinguish Science From Pseudoscience?

I Promise To Question Everything My Leaders Tell Me. I Promise To Use My Critical Faculties. I Promise To Develop My Independence Of Thought. I Promise To Educate Myself So I Can Make My Own Judgments.

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?

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 Don't Know The Answer. Maybe No One Knows. Maybe When You Grow Up, You'll Be The First To Find Out.

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?"

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.

There Are Wonders Enough Out There Without Our Inventing Any.

The Earth Is A Very Small Stage In A Vast Cosmic Arena. Think Of The Rivers Of Blood Spilled By All Those Generals And Emperors So That, In Glory And Triumph, They Could Become The Momentary Masters Of A Fraction Of A Dot. Think Of The Endless Cruelties Visited By The Inhabitants Of One Corner Of This Pixel On The Scarcely Distinguishable Inhabitants Of Some Other Corner, How Frequent Their Misunderstandings, How Eager They Are To Kill One Another, How Fervent Their Hatreds.

Books Are Like Seeds. They Can Lie Dormant For Centuries And Then Flower In The Most Unpromising Soil.

Be Grateful Everyday For The Brief But Magnificent Opportunity That Life Provides.

A Central Lesson Of Science Is That To Understand Complex Issues (or Even Simple Ones), We Must Try To Free Our Minds Of Dogma And To Guarantee The Freedom To Publish, To Contradict, And To Experiment. Arguments From Authority Are Unacceptable.

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

We Live On A Hunk Of Rock And Metal That Circles A Humdrum Star That Is One Of 400 Billion Other Stars That Make Up The Milky Way Galaxy Which Is One Of Billions Of Other Galaxies Which Make Up A Universe Which May Be One Of A Very Large Number, Perhaps An Infinite Number, Of Other Universes. That Is A Perspective On Human Life And Our Culture That Is Well Worth Pondering.

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