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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.

-Carl Sagan

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The Dumbing Down Of

Carl Sagan

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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.

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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

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

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.

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

The Prediction I Can Make With The Highest Confidence Is That The Most Amazing Discoveries Will Be The Ones We Are Not Today Wise Enough To Foresee.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Who Will Speak For Planet Earth?

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

It Is The Responsibility Of Scientists Never To Suppress Knowledge, No Matter How Awkward That Knowledge Is, No Matter How It May Bother Those In Power; We Are Not Smart Enough To Decide Which Pieces Of Knowledge Are Permissible, And Which Are Not.

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.

We Are All Star Stuff.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Any Civilization That Doesn't Develop Space Travel Dies.

We Live In A Society Exquisitely Dependent On Science And Technology, In Which Hardly Anyone Knows Anything About Science And Technology.

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.

When You Make The Finding Yourself - Even If You're The Last Person On Earth To See The Light - You'll Never Forget It.

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.

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

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

[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.

If The Press Descended, The Science Would Surely Suffer.

If We Say That God Has Always Been, Why Not Save A Step And Conclude That The Universe Has Always Been?

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.

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

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.

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

Science Is Only A Latin Word For Knowledge

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

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

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.

The Wind Whips Through The Canyons Of The American Southwest, And There Is No One To Hear It But Us - A Reminder Of The 40,000 Generations Of Thinking Men And Women Who Preceded Us, About Whom We Know Almost Nothing, Upon Whom Our Civilization Is Based.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Maxwell's Equations Have Had A Greater Impact On Human History Than Any Ten Presidents.

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.

He Didn't Want To Believe. He Wanted To Know.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

Since World War Ii, Japan Has Spawned Enormous Numbers Of New Religions Featuring The Supernatural.... In Thailand, Diseases Are Treated With Pills Manufactured From Pulverized Sacred Scripture. Witches Are Today Being Burned In South Africa.... The Worldwide Tm [transcendental Meditation] Organization Has An Estimated Valuation Of $3 Billion. For A Fee, They Promise To Make You Invisible, To Enable You To Fly.

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

Goddard Represented A Unique Combination Of Visionary Dedication And Technological Brilliance. He Studied Physics Because He Needed Physics To Get To Mars. In Reading The Notebooks Of Robert Goddard, I Am Struck By How Powerful His Exploratory And Scientific Motivations Were - And How Influental Speculative Ideas, Even Erroneous Ones, Can Be On The Shaping Of The Future.

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?

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 Live In An In-between Universe Where Things Change All Right...but According To Patterns, Rules, Or As We Call Them, Laws Of Nature.

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

All Civilizations Become Either Spacefaring Or Extinct.

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.

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.

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

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.

All Inquiries Carry With Them Some Element Of Risk.

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.

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

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

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

The Suppression Of Uncomfortable Ideas May Be Common In Religion Or In Politics, But It Is Not The Path To Knowledge; It Has No In The Endeavor Of Science. We Do Not Know In Advance Who Will Discover Fundamental Insights.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

The Universe Seems Neither Benign Nor Hostile, Merely Indifferent.

The Neurochemistry Of The Brain Is Astonishingly Busy, The Circuitry Of A Machine More Wonderful Than Any Devised By Humans. But There Is No Evidence That Its Functioning Is Due To Anything More Than The 10(14) Neural Connections That Build An Elegant Architecture Of Consciousness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We Are The Only Species On The Planet, So Far As We Know, To Have Invented A Communal Memory Stored Neither In Our Genes Nor In Our Brains. The Warehouse Of This Memory Is Called The Library

I Can Find In My Undergraduate Classes, Bright Students Who Do Not Know That The Stars Rise And Set At Night, Or Even That The Sun Is A Star.

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 Simplest Thought, Like The Concept Of The Number One, Has An Elaborate Logical Underpinning.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

(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.

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.

Billions And Billions.

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.

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.

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

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

To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.)

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

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

We Are All Made Up Of Star Stuff.

If We Ruin The Earth, There Is No Place Else To Go

The Big Bang Is Our Modern Scientific Creation Myth. It Comes From The Same Human Need To Solve The Cosmological Riddle [where Did The Universe Come From?]

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

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

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 Live On A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam

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

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.

We Are Star Stuff Harvesting Sunlight.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

It Is Far Better To Grasp The Universe As It Really Is Than To Persist In Delusion, However Satisfying And Reassuring.

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 Colours Are Arbitrary.

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.

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

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

The Illegality Of Cannabis Is Outrageous.

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.

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

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

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 One Species. We Are Starstuff.

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.

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

We Are Made Of Starstuff.

There Is Never Only One Of Anything In Nature.

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

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

The 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.

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.

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

Mathematical Equations

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.

We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still.

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

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.

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

We Can Always Take But Never Give.

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.

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

Extraterrestrial

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

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

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.

Whatever The Reason You're On Mars, I'm Glad You're There, And I Wish I Was With You.

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

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

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.

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 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.

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.

If Our Long-term Survival Is At Stake, We Have A Basic Responsibility To Our Species To Venture To Other Worlds. Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense The Stirring Of A Breeze.

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?

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

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.

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