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...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.

-Carl Sagan

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Carl Sagan

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...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.

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

If We Offer Too Much Silent Assent About Mysticism And Superstition - Even When It Seems To Be Doing A Little Good - We Abet A General Climate In Which Scepticism Is Considered Impolite, Science Tiresome, And Rigorous Thinking Somehow Stuffy And Inappropriate.

I Believe That In Every Person Is A Kind Of Circuit Which Resonates To Intellectual Discovery-and The Idea Is To Make That Resonance Work

All Civilizations Become Either Spacefaring Or Extinct.

The Surface Of The Earth Is The Shore Of The Cosmic Ocean. From It We Have Learned Most Of What We Know. Recently, We Have Waded A Little Out To Sea, Enough To Dampen Our Toes Or, At Most, Wet Our Ankles. The Water Seems Inviting. The Ocean Calls.

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

If There Is Life, Then I Believe We Should Do Nothing To Disturb That Life. Mars Then, Belongs To The Martians, Even If They Are Microbes.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The Price We Pay For Anticipation Of The Future Is Anxiety About It

Extraordinary Observations Require Extraordinary Evidence To Make Them Believable.

Billions And Billions.

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.

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?

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

In A Lot Of Scientists, The Ratio Of Wonder To Skepticism Declines In Time. That May Be Connected With The Fact That In Some Fields-mathematics, Physics, Some Others-the Great Discoveries Are Almost Entirely Made By Youngsters.

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.

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

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

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

Extinction Is The Rule. Survival Is The Exception.

Mass Extinction

Exception To The Rule

On The Day That We Do Discover That We Are Not Alone, Our Society May Begin To Evolve And Transform In Some Incredible And Wondrous New Ways.

We Were Wanderers From The Beginning.

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.

The Cosmos Is All That Is Or Was Or Ever Will Be. Our Feeblest Contemplations Of The Cosmos Stir Us -- There Is A Tingling In The Spine, A Catch In The Voice, A Faint Sensation, As If A Distant Memory, Of Falling From A Height. We Know We Are Approaching The Greatest Of Mysteries.

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.

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.

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.

Real Patriots Ask Questions.

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.

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.

Who Is More Humble? The Scientist Who Looks At The Universe With An Open Mind And Accepts Whatever The Universe Has To Teach Us, Or Somebody Who Says Everything In This Book Must Be Considered The Literal Truth And Never Mind The Fallibility Of All The Human Beings Involved?

A Book Is Made From A Tree. It Is An Assemblage Of Flat, Flexible Parts (still Called "leaves") Imprinted With Dark Pigmented Squiggles. One Glance At It And You Hear The Voice Of Another Person, Perhaps Someone Dead For Thousands Of Years. Across The Millennia, The Author Is Speaking, Clearly And Silently, Inside Your Head, Directly To You. Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions, Binding Together People, Citizens Of Distant Epochs, Who Never Knew One Another. Books Break The Shackles Of Time ― Proof That Humans Can Work Magic.

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.

We Can Make A Similar Examination, But With Greater Uncertainty, Of The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis That Holds That A Wide Range Of Ufos Viewed On The Planet Earth Are Space Vehicles From Planets Of Other Stars.

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.

We Are Made Of Starstuff.

At The Extremes It Is Difficult To Distinguish Pseudoscience From Rigid, Doctrinaire Religion.

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.

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

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.

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?

Every Time You Look Up At The Sky, Every One Of Those Points Of Light Is A Reminder That Fusion Power Is Extractable From Hydrogen And Other Light Elements, And It Is An Everyday Reality Throughout The Milky Way Galaxy.

We Are All Star Stuff.

If The Constellations Had Been Named In The Twentieth Century, I Suppose We Would See Bicycles And Refrigerators In The Sky.

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.

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.

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

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.

After I Give Lectures-on Almost Any Subject-i Am Often Asked, "do You Believe In Ufos?" I'm Always Struck By How The Question Is Phrased, The Suggestion That This Is A Matter Of Belief And Not Evidence. I'm Almost Never Asked, "how Good Is The Evidence That Ufos Are Alien Spaceships?"

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.

We Have Also Arranged Things So That Almost No One Understands Science And Technology. This Is A Prescription For Disaster. We Might Get Away With It For A While, But Sooner Or Later This Combustible Mixture Of Ignorance And Power Is Going To Blow Up In Our Faces.

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.

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.

Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known.

Man Is The Matter Of The Cosmos, Contemplating Itself.

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

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.

You Have To Know The Past To Understand The Present.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

At The Heart Of Science Is An Essential Balance Between Two Seemingly Contradictory Attitudes-an Openness To New Ideas, No Matter How Bizarre Or Counterintuitive They May Be, And The Most Ruthless Skeptical Scrutiny Of All Ideas, Old And New. This Is How Deep Truths Are Winnowed From Deep Nonsense.

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

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

Because Men, Compared To Male Chimps, Have Such Relatively Small Testicles (large Testicles Indicate A Species Where Many Males Mate, One After The Other, With The Same Female), We Might Guess That Promiscuous Societies Were Uncommon In The Immediate Human Past.

Indeed The Reasoned Criticism Of A Prevailing Belief Is A Service To The Proponents Of That Belief; If They Are Incapable Of Defending It, They Are Well Advised To Abandon It. This Self-questioning And Error-correcting Aspect Of The Scientific Method Is Its Most Striking Property.

Self Questioning

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

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

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

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

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

With Insufficient Data It Is Easy To Go Wrong.

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.

To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

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

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.

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

The Usual Rejoinder To Someone Who Says 'they Laughed At Columbus, They Laughed At Galileo' Is To Say 'but They Also Laughed At Bozo The Clown'.

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 Are A Way Of The Universe Knowing Itself.

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

It Is Said That Men May Not Be The Dreams Of The God, But Rather That The Gods Are The Dreams Of Men.

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

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.

At A Few Hundred Kilometers Altitude, The Earth Fills Half Your Sky, And The Band Of Blue That Stretches From Mindanao To Bombay, Which Your Eye Encompasses In A Single Glance, Can Break Your Heart With Its Beauty. Home You Think. Home. This Is My World. This Is Where I Come From. Everyone I Know, Everyone I Ever Heard Of, Grew Up Down There, Under That Relentless And Exquisite Blue.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We Are, Each Of Us, A Multitude. Within Us Is A Little Universe.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We Are Prodding, Challenging, Seeking Contradictions Or Small, Persistent Residual Errors, Proposing Alternative Explanations, Encouraging Heresy. We Give Our Highest Rewards To Those Who Convincingly Disprove Established Beliefs.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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

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.

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

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.

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

A Single Message From Space Will Show That It Is Possible To Live Through Technological Adolescence. . . . It Is Possible That The Future Of Human Civilization Depends On The Receipt Of Interstellar Messages.

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.

[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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Trial And Error

We Are Like Butterflies Who Flutter For A Day And Think It Is Forever.

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.

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.

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.

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

Demon Mean Knowledge In Greek, Especially About The Material World. Science Means Knowledge In Latin. A Jurisdictional Dispute Is Exposed, Even If We Look No Further

I Set Before You Two Ways: You Can Use Your Technology To Destroy Yourselves Or To Carry You To The Planets And The Stars. It's Up To You.

Both The Freudian And The Platonic Metaphors Emphasize The Considerable Independence Of And Tension Among The Constituent Parts Of The Psyche, A Point That Characterizes The Human Condition.

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.

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 Absence Of Evidence Is Not The Evidence Of Absence.

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

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

Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Proof.

You Mustn't Think Of The Universe As A Wilderness. It Hasn't Been That For Billions Of Years," He Said. "think Of It More As... ..cultivated.

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

...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.

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

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

Mathematical Equations

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Theoretical Physics

We Are An Intelligent Species And The Use Of Our Intelligence Quite Properly Gives Us Pleasure. In This Respect The Brain Is Like A Muscle. When We Think Well, We Feel Good. Understanding Is A Kind Of Ecstasy.

We Live On A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam

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.

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.

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

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?

An Organism At War With Itself Is Doomed.

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.

There Are Many Other (besides Testosterone) Behaviour-eliciting Hormones Fundamental For Humen Well-being, Including Estrogen And Progesterone In Females. The Fact That Complex Behavioural Patterns Can Be Triggered By A Tiny Concentration Of Moleculas Coursing Through The Bloodstream, And That Different Animals Of The Same Species Generate Different Amounts Of These Hormones, Is Something Worth Thinking About When It's Time To Judge Such Matters As Free Will, Individual Responsibility, And Law And Order.

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?

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

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

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

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

Extraterrestrial

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

Chlorine Is A Deadly Poison Gas Employed On European Battlefields In World War I. Sodium Is A Corrosive Metal Which Burns Upon Contact With Water. Together They Make A Placid And Unpoisonous Material, Table Salt. Why Each Of These Substances Has The Properties It Does Is A Subject Called Chemistry.

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.

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

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

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