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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.

-Carl Sagan

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Present Global Culture Is

Carl Sagan

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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.

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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.

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

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.

Man Is The Matter Of The Cosmos, Contemplating Itself.

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?

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.

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.

Our Intelligence Is Imperfect, Surely, And Newly Arisen; The Ease With Which It Can Be Sweet-talked, Overwhelmed, Or Subverted By Other Hardwired Propensities - Sometimes Themselves Disguised As The Cool Light Of Reason - Is Worrisome.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It's A Lazy Saturday Afternoon, There's A Couple Lying Naked In Bed Reading Encyclopediea Brittannica To Each Other, And Arguing About Whether The Andromeda Galaxy Is More 'numinous' Than The Ressurection. Do They Know How To Have A Good Time, Or Don't They?

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

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

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

Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Proof.

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 Can Always Take But Never Give.

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.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is.

The Secrets Of Evolution Are Death And Time-the Deaths Of Enormous Numbers Of Lifeforms That Were Imperfectly Adapted To The Environment; And Time For A Long Succession Of Small Mutations.

Your God Is Too Small For My Universe.

Valid Criticism Does You A Favor.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

It's Perilous And Foolhardy For The Average Citizen To Remain Ignorant About Global Warming, Say, Or Ozone Depletion, Air Pollution, Toxic And Radioactive Wastes, Acid Rain, Topsoil Erosion, Tropical Deforestation, Exponential Population Growth. Jobs And Wages Depend On Science And Technology.

The Notion That Science And Spirituality Are Somehow Mutually Exclusive Does A Disservice To Both.

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

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.

And After We Returned To The Savannahs And Abandoned The Trees, Did We Long For Those Great Graceful Leaps And Ecstatic Moments Of Weightlessness In The Shafts Of Sunlight Of The Forest Roof?

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

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

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

As The Ancient Myth Makers Knew, We Are Children Equally Of The Earth And The Sky.

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.

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

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

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.

Discussing The Possibilities Of Extraterrestrial Life: I Would Love It Even If They Were Short, Sullen, Grumpy And Sexually Obsessed. But There Just Isn't Any Good Evidence.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I Am Not An Atheist. An Atheist Is Someone Who Has Compelling Evidence That There Is No Judeo-christian-islamic God. I Am Not That Wise, But Neither Do I Consider There To Be Anything Approaching Adequate Evidence For Such A God. Why Are You In Such A Hurry To Make Up Your Mind? Why Not Simply Wait Until There Is Compelling Evidence?

We Live On A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam

In The Deepest Sense The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Is A Search For Ourselves.

Extraterrestrial

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.

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

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.

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 Wonders Enough Out There Without Our Inventing Any.

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

For Small Creatures Such As We The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love.

All Civilizations Become Either Spacefaring Or Extinct.

We Are Made Of Starstuff.

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.

Science Is Far From A Perfect Instrument Of Knowledge. It's Just The Best We Have.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

And You Are Made Of A Hundred Trillion Cells. We Are, Each Of Us, A Multitude.

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.

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

If Some Good Evidence For Life After Death Were Announced, I'd Be Eager To Examine It; But It Would Have To Be Real Scientific Data, Not Mere Anecdote. As With The Face On Mars And Alien Abductions, Better The Hard Truth, I Say, Than The Comforting Fantasy.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

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?

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

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?

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.

The Visions We Offer Our Children Shape The Future.

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.

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

Mathematical Equations

The Open Road Still Softly Calls.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

We Are A Way For The Cosmos To Know Itself.

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

I Would Love To Believe That When I Die I Will Live Again, That Some Thinking, Feeling, Remembering Part Of Me Will Continue. But As Much As I Want To Believe That, And Despite The Ancient And Worldwide Cultural Traditions That Assert An Afterlife, I Know Of Nothing To Suggest That It Is More Than Wishful Thinking.

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.

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

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

Optical Illusions

The 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.

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.

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.

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

How Lucky We Are To Live In This Time / The First Moment In Human History / When We Are In Fact Visiting Other Worlds

There Is Today-in A Time When Old Beliefs Are Withering-a Kind Of Philosophical Hunger, A Need To Know Who We Are And How We Got Here. It Is An On-going Search, Often Unconscious, For A Cosmic Perspective For Humanity

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

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.

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

We Were Wanderers From The Beginning.

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

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.

Cleverly Designed Experiments Are The Key.

The Cosmos Is All There Is, All There Ever Was, And All There Ever Will Be.

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.

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

Science Is Only A Latin Word For Knowledge

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.

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.

Life Is But A Momentary Glimpse Of The Wonder Of This Astonishing Universe, And It Is Sad To See So Many Dreaming It Away On Spiritual Fantasy.

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

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

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

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

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

We Are A Way Of The Universe Knowing Itself.

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

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.

The Difference Between Physics And Metaphysics Is Not That The Practitioners Of One Are Smarter Than The Practitioners Of The Other. The Difference Is That The Metaphysicist Has No Laboratory.

I Would Be Very Ashamed Of My Civilization If We Did Not Try To Find Out If There Is Life In Outer Space.

In More Than One Respect, The Exploring Of The Solar System And Homesteading Other Worlds Constitutes The Beginning, Much More Than The End, Of History.

One Glance At A Book And You Hear The Voice Of Another Person, Perhaps Someone Dead For 1,000 Years. To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

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

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.

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

If You Want To Save Your Child From Polio, You Can Pray Or You Can Inoculate....try Science.

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.

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

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

People Are Not Stupid. They Believe Things For Reasons. The Last Way For Skeptics To Get The Attention Of Bright, Curious, Intelligent People Is To Belittle Or Condescend Or To Show Arrogance Toward Their Beliefs.

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

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.

What Does It Mean For A Civilisation To Be A Million Years Old? We Have Had Radio Telescopes And Spaceships For A Few Decades; Our Technical Civilisation Is A Few Hundred Years Old ... An Advanced Civilisation Millions Of Years Old Is As Much Beyond Us As We Are Beyond A Bushbaby Or A Macaque

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

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?

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.

My Long-time View About Christianity Is That It Represents An Amalgam Of Two Seemingly Immiscible Parts-the Religion Of Jesus And The Religion Of Paul. Thomas Jefferson Attempted To Excise The Pauline Parts Of The New Testament. There Wasn't Much Left When He Was Done, But It Was An Inspiring Document.

I Hold That Popularization Of Science Is Successful If, At First, It Does No More Than Spark The Sense Of Wonder.

Any Civilization That Doesn't Develop Space Travel Dies.

There Is Never Only One Of Anything In Nature.

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.

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.

I Believe That Part Of What Propels Science Is The Thirst For Wonder. It's A Very Powerful Emotion. All Children Feel It. In A First Grade Classroom Everybody Feels It; In A Twelfth Grade Classroom Almost Nobody Feels It, Or At Least Acknowledges It. Something Happens Between First And Twelfth Grade, And It's Not Just Puberty. Not Only Do The Schools And The Media Not Teach Much Skepticism, There Is Also Little Encouragement Of This Stirring Sense Of Wonder. Science And Pseudoscience Both Arouse That Feeling. Poor Popularizations Of Science Establish An Ecological Niche For Pseudoscience.

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.

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?” Instead They Say, “no, No, No! My God Is A Little God, And I Want Him To Stay That Way.” 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.

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.

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.

Books Break The Shackles Of Time, Proof That Humans Can Work Magic.

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.

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

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

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.

Eratosthenes Was The Director Of The Great Library Of Alexandria, The Centre Of Science And Learning In The Ancient World. Aristotle Had Argued That Humanity Was Divided Into Greeks And Everybody Else, Whom He Called Barbarians And That The Greeks Should Keep Themselves Racially Pure. He Thought It Was Fitting For The Greeks To Enslave Other Peoples. But Erathosthenes Criticized Aristotle For His Blind Chauvinism, He Believed There Was Good And Bad In Every Nation.

A Celibate Clergy Is An Especially Good Idea, Because It Tends To Suppress Any Hereditary Propensity Toward Fanaticism.

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.

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?

[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.

Whenever Our Ethnic Or National Prejudices Are Aroused, In Times Of Scarcity, During Challenges To National Self Esteem Or Nerve, When We Agonize About Our Diminished Cosmic Place And Purpose, Or When Fanaticism Is Bubbling Up Around Us - Then, Habits Of Thought Familiar From Ages Past Reach For The Controls.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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