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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.

-Carl Sagan

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One Of The Saddest

Carl Sagan

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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.

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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.

All Of The Rocky And Metallic Material We Stand On, The Iron In Our Blood, The Calcium In Our Teeth, The Carbon In Our Genes Were Produced Billions Of Years Ago In The Interior Of A Red Giant Star. We Are Made Of Star Stuff.

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.

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

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.

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 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.

All Inquires Carry With Them Some Element Of Risk. There Is No Guarantee That The Universe Will Conform To Our Predispositions.

Guarantees That

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

In All Our Searching, The Only Thing We've Found That Makes The Emptiness Bearable Is Each Other.

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.

Some Racists Still Reject The Plain Testimony Written In The Dna That All The Races Are Not Only Human But Nearly Indistinguishable. . . .

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.

We On Earth Have Just Awakened To The Great Oceans Of Space And Time From Which We Have Emerged. We Are The Legacy Of 15 Billion Years Of Cosmic Evolution. We Have A Choice: We Can Enhance Life And Come To Know The Universe That Made Us, Or We Can Squander Our 15 Billion-year Heritage In Meaningless Self-destruction. What Happens In The First Second Of The Next Cosmic Year Depends On What We Do, Here And Now, With Our Intelligence And Our Knowledge Of The Cosmos.

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?

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.

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

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

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

You Can Get Into A Habit Of Thought In Which You Enjoy Making Fun Of All Those Other People Who Don't See Things As Clearly As You Do. We Have To Guard Carefully Against It.

The Library Connects Us With The Insight And Knowledge, Painfully Extracted From Nature, Of The Greatest Minds That Ever Were, With The Best Teachers, Drawn From The Entire Planet And From All Our History, To Instruct Us Without Tiring, And To Inspire Us To Make Our Own Contribution To The Collective Knowledge Of The Human Species.

Science Is Only A Latin Word For Knowledge

The Romans Called The Christians Atheists. Why? Well, The Christians Had A God Of Sorts, But It Wasn't A Real God. They Didn't Believe In The Divinity Of Apotheosized Emperors Or Olympian Gods. They Had A Peculiar, Different Kind Of God. So It Was Very Easy To Call People Who Believed In A Different Kind Of God Atheists. And That General Sense That An Atheist Is Anybody Who Doesn't Believe Exactly As I Do Prevails In Our Own Time.

Science Is A Collaborative Enterprise, Spanning The Generations. When It Permits Us To See The Far Side Of Some New Horizon, We Remember Those Who Prepared The Way - Seeing For Them Also.

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 Gears Of Poverty, Ignorance, Hopelessness And Low Self-esteem Interact To Create A Kind Of Perpetual Failure Machine That Grinds Down Dreams From Generation To Generation. We All Bear The Cost Of Keeping It Running. Illiteracy Is Its Linchpin.

Better The Hard Truth, I Say, Than The Comforting Fantasy.

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.

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.

Real Patriots Ask Questions.

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.

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.

That Kind Of Skeptical, Questioning, "don't Accept What Authority Tells You" Attitude Of Science - Is Also Nearly Identical To The Attitude Of Mind Necessary For A Functioning Democracy. Science And Democracy Have Very Consonant Values And Approaches, And I Don't Think You Can Have One Without The Other.

Democracies Have

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

In Mozambique, The Story Goes, Monkeys Do Not Talk, Because They Know If They Utter Even A Single Word Some Man Will Come And Put Them To Work.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Extraordinary Observations Require Extraordinary Evidence To Make Them Believable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known.

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Trial And Error

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You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

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

There Are No Forbidden Questions In Science, No Matters Too Sensitive Or Delicate To Be Probed, No Sacred Truths.

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.

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Any Civilization That Doesn't Develop Space Travel Dies.

An Organism At War With Itself Is Doomed.

So Those Who Wished For Some Central Cosmic Purpose For Us, Or At Least Our World, Or At Least Our Solar System, Or At Least Our Galaxy, Have Been Disappointed, Progressively Disappointed. The Universe Is Not Responsive To Our Ambitious Expectations.

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.

Religions Are Tough. Either They Make No Contentions Which Are Subject To Disproof Or They Quickly Redesign Doctrine After Disproof. ... Near The Core Of The Religious Experience Is Something Remarkably Resistant To Rational Inquiry.

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

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.

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With Insufficient Data It Is Easy To Go Wrong.

The Desire To Be Connected With The Cosmos Reflects A Profound Reality, But We Are Connected; Not In The Trivial Ways That Astrology Promises, But In The Deepest Ways.

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

We Are All Star Stuff.

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

Our Planet Is A Lonely Speck In The Great Enveloping Cosmic Dark. In Our Obscurity, In All This Vastness, There Is No Hint That Help Will Come From Elsewhere To Save Us From Ourselves.

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.

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Too Much Openness And You Accept Every Notion, Idea, And Hypothesis-which Is Tantamount To Knowing Nothing. Too Much Skepticism-especially Rejection Of New Ideas Before They Are Adequately Tested-and You're Not Only Unpleasantly Grumpy, But Also Closed To The Advance Of Science. A Judicious Mix Is What We Need.

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.

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 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.

The Beauty Of A Living Thing Is Not The Atoms That Go Into It, But The Way Those Atoms Are Put Together.

We Need To Reduce Military Budgets; Raise Living Standards; Engender Respect For Learning; Support Science, Scholarship, Invention, And Industry; Promote Free Inquiry; Reduce Domestic Coercion; Involve The Workers More In Managerial Decisions; And Promote Genuine Respect And Understanding Derived From An Acknowledgement Of Our Common Humanity And Our Common Jeopardy.

Common Humanity

...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.

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.

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.

Science ... Looks Skeptically At All Claims To Knowledge, Old And New. It Teaches Not Blind Obedience To Those In Authority But To Vigorous Debate, And In Many Respects That's The Secret Of Its Success.

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

There Is In This Universe Much Of What Seems To Be Design.

History Is Full Of People Who Out Of Fear, Or Ignorance, Or Lust For Power Has Destroyed Knowledge Of Immeasurable Value Which Truly Belongs To Us All. We Must Not Let It Happen Again.

The Very Act Of Understanding Is A Celebration Of Joining, Merging, Even If On A Very Modest Scale, With The Magnificence Of The Cosmos.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We Live On A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam

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

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

Theoretical Physics

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

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.

What Distinguishes Our Species Is Thought. The Cerebral Cortex Is In A Way A Liberation. We Need No Longer Be Trapped In The Genetically Inherited Behavior Patterns Of Lizards And Baboons: Territoriality And Aggression And Dominance Hierarchies. We Are Each Of Us Largely Responsible For What Gets Put In To Our Brains. For What As Adults We Wind Up Caring For And Knowing About. No Longer At The Mercy Of The Reptile Brain We Can Change Ourselves. Think Of The Possibilities.

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.

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

In Exchange For Freedom Of Inquiry, Scientists Are Obliged To Explain Their Work.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

For Years I've Been Stressing With Regard To Ufos That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

Billions And Billions.

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.

I Think The Discomfort That Some People Feel In Going To The Monkey Cages At The Zoo Is A Warning Sign.

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

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.

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.

The Hindu Religion Is The Only One 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. It Is The Only Religion In Which The Time Scales Correspond, No Doubt By Accident, To Those Of Modern Scientific Cosmology. Its Cycles Run From Our Ordinary Day And Night To A Day And Night Of Brahma, 8.64 Billion Years Long, Longer Than The Age Of The Earth Or The Sun And About Half The Time Since The Big Bang.

'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.'

The Earth Is A Very Small Stage In A Vast Cosmic Arena.

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.

(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.

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

The Uniqueness Of Humans Has Been Claimed On Many Grounds, But Most Often Because Of Our Tool-making, Culture, Language, Reason And Morality. We Have Them, The Other Animals Don't, And -- So The Argument Goes -- That's That.

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

If You Look At Earth From Space You See A Dot, That's Here. That's Home. That's Us. It Underscores The Responsibility To Deal More Kindly And Compassionately With One Another And To Preserve And Cherish That Pale Blue Dot, The Only Home We've Ever Known.

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.

Finding The Occasional Straw Of Truth Awash In A Great Ocean Of Confusion And Bamboozle Requires Intelligence, Vigilance, Dedication, And Courage. But If We Don't Practice These Tough Habits Of Thought, We Cannot Hope To Solve The Truly Serious Problems That Face Us --- And We Risk Becoming A Nation Of Suckers, Up For Grabs By The Next Charlatan Who Comes Along.

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.

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

We Can Judge Our Progress By The Courage Of Our Questions And The Depth Of Our Answers, Our Willingness To Embrace What Is True Rather Than What Feels Good.

The Way To Find Out About Our Place In The Universe Is By Examining The Universe And By Examining Ourselves - Without Preconceptions, With As Unbiased A Mind As We Can Muster.

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 Loyalties Are To The Species And The Planet. We Speak For Earth. Our Obligation To Survive Is Owed Not Just To Ourselves But Also To That Cosmos, Ancient And Vast, From Which We Spring.

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.

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

A Millennium Before Europeans Were Willing To Divest Themselves Of The Biblical Idea That The World Was A Few Thousand Years Old, The Mayans Were Thinking Of Millions And The Hindus Billions.

A Googolplex Is Precisely As Far From Infinity As Is The Number 1... No Matter What Number You Have In Mind, Infinity Is Larger Still.

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.

Clutching Our Crystals And Religiously Consulting Our Horoscopes, Our Critical Faculties In Steep Decline, Unable To Distinguish Between What's True And What Feels Good, We Slide, Almost Without Noticing, Into Superstition And Darkness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Atoms Are Mainly Empty Space. Matter Is Composed Chiefly Of Nothing.

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

The Universe Forces Those Who Live In It To Understand It.

When You Realize That No One Really Knows What They Are Doing And That Everyone Is Doing The Best They Can According To Their Own Level Of Consciousness, Life Gets A Lot Easier. Skeptical Scrutiny Is The Means, In Both Science And Religion, By Which Deep Thoughts Can Be Winnowed From Deep Nonsense.

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.

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

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

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.

We Are The Universe Experiencing Itself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Because God Can Be Relegated To Remote Times And Places And To Ultimate Causes, We Would Have To Know A Great Deal More About The Universe Than We Do Now To Be Sure That No Such God Exists. To Be Certain Of The Existence Of God And To Be Certain Of The Nonexistence Of God Seem To Me To Be The Confident Extremes In A Subject So Riddled With Doubt And Uncertainty As To Inspire Very Little Confidence Indeed.

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

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.

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.

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.

It Seems Madness To Say, 'we're Worried That They're Going To Become Addicted To Marijuana' -- There's No Evidence Whatever That It's An Addictive Drug, But Even If It Were, These People Are Dying, What Are We Saving Them From?

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

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

If We Do Not Speak For Earth, Who Will? If We Are Not Committed To Our Own Survival, Who Will Be?

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

Your God Is Too Small For My Universe.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

War Is Murder Writ Large.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is. It’s A Flat Object Made From A Tree With Flexible Parts On Which Are Imprinted Lots Of Funny Dark Squiggles. But One Glance At It And You’re Inside The Mind Of Another Person, Maybe Somebody Dead For Thousands Of Years. ... Books Break The Shackles Of Time. A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Working Magic.

Is Mankind Alone In The Universe? Or Are There Somewhere Other Intelligent Beings Looking Up Into Their Night Sky From Very Different Worlds And Asking The Same Kind Of Question?

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.

Extinction Is The Rule. Survival Is The Exception.

Mass Extinction

Exception To The Rule

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.

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

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

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

We Are The First Species To Have Taken Our Evolution Into Our Own Hands.

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