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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.

-Carl Sagan

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We've Begun At Last

Carl Sagan

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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.

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That We Can Now Think Of No Mechanism For Astrology Is Relevant But Unconvincing. No Mechanism Was Known, For Example, For Continental Drift When It Was Proposed By Wegener. Nevertheless, We See That Wegener Was Right, And Those Who Objected On The Grounds Of Unavailable Mechanism Were Wrong.

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

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

In College, In The Early 1950s, I Began To Learn A Little About How Science Works, The Secrets Of Its Great Success, How Rigorous The Standards Of Evidence Must Be If We Are Really To Know Something Is True, How Many False Starts And Dead Ends Have Plagued Human Thinking, How Our Biases Can Colour Our Interpretation Of Evidence, And How Often Belief Systems Widely Held And Supported By The Political, Religious And Academic Hierarchies Turn Out To Be Not Just Slightly In Error, But Grotesquely Wrong.

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

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.

Human Beings Have A Demonstrated Talent For Self-deception When Their Emotions Are Stirred.

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.

We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still.

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

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.

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

The Understanding Of The Intent Of The Artist Which I Can Achieve When High Sometimes Carries Over To When I’m Down. This Is One Of Many Human Frontiers Which Cannabis Has Helped Me Traverse.

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

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.

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.

These Days There Seems To Be Nowhere Left To Explore, At Least On The Land Area Of The Earth. Victims Of Their Very Success, The Explorers Now Pretty Much Stay Home.

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.

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.

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

Those Afraid Of The Universe As It Really Is, Those Who Pretend To Nonexistent Knowledge And Envision A Cosmos Centered On Human Beings Will Prefer The Fleeting Comforts Of Superstition.

Organic As A Dandelion Seed, [the Ship Of Our Imagination] Will Carry Us To Worlds Of Dreams And Worlds Of Facts

Human History Can Be Viewed As A Slowly Dawning Awareness That We Are Members Of A Larger Group Groups Of People From Divergent Ethnic And Cultural Backgrounds Working In Some Sense Together [is] Surely A Humanizing And Character Building Experience. If We Are To Survive, Our Loyalties Must Be Broadened Further, To Include The Whole Human Community, The Entire Planet Earth.

'in His Celebrated Book, 'on Liberty', The English Philosopher John Stuart Mill Argued That Silencing An Opinion Is "a Peculiar Evil." If The Opinion Is Right, We Are Robbed Of The "opportunity Of Exchanging Error For Truth"; And If It's Wrong, We Are Deprived Of A Deeper Understanding Of The Truth In Its "collision With Error." If We Know Only Our Own Side Of The Argument, We Hardly Know Even That: It Becomes Stale, Soon Learned By Rote, Untested, A Pallid And Lifeless Truth.'

We Are All Made Up Of Star Stuff.

The Sky Calls To Us. If We Do Not Destroy Ourselves, We Will One Day Venture To The Stars.

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 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.

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.

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

Mathematical Equations

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

A Proclivity For Science Is Embedded Deeply Within Us, In All Times, Places, And Cultures. It Has Been The Means For Our Survival. It Is Our Birthright. When, Through Indifference, Inattention, Incompetence, Or Fear Of Skepticism, We Discourage Children From Science, We Are Disenfranchisin G Them, Taking From Them The Tools Needed To Manage Their Future.

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.

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

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

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

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

In The Vastness Of The Cosmos There Must Be Other Civilizations Far Older And More Advanced Than Ours.

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

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

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

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?

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.

Since, In The Long Run, Every Planetary Society Will Be Endangered By Impacts From Space, Every Surviving Civilization Is Obliged To Become Spacefaring — Not Because Of Exploratory Or Romantic Zeal, But For The Most Practical Reason Imaginable: Staying Alive.

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.

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.

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.

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

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

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.

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?]

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

I Consider It An Extremely Dangerous Doctrine, Because The More Likely We Are To Assume That The Solution Comes From The Outside, The Less Likely We Are To Solve Our Problems Ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 Illegality Of Cannabis Is Outrageous.

We Are Rare And Precious Because We Are Alive, Because We Can Think As Well As We Can. We Are Privileged To Influence And Perhaps Control Our Future. I Believe We Have An Obligation To Fight For Life On Earth - Not Just For Ourselves, But For All Those, Humans And Others, Who Came Before Us, And To Whom We Are Beholden, And For All Those Who, If We Are Wise Enough, Will Come After.

I 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.

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

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.

(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.

I Believe That Even A Smattering Of Such Findings In Modern Science And Mathematics Is Far More Compelling And Exciting Than Most Of The Doctrines Of Pseudoscience, Whose Practitioners Were Condemned As Early As The Fifth Century B.c. By The Ionian Philosopher Heraclitus As “nigh -walkers, Magicians, Priests Of Bacchus, Priestesses Of The Wine-vat, Mystery-mongers.” But Science Is More Intricate And Subtle, Reveals A Much Richer Imiverse, And Powerfully Evokes Our Sense Of Wonder.

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?"

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

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.

Your God Is Too Small For My Universe.

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?

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

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.

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

Guarantees That

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.

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.

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

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

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

We Have Heard The Rationales Offered By The Nuclear Superpowers. We Know Who Speaks For The Nations. But Who Speaks For The Human Species? Who Speaks For Earth?

But I Try Not To Think With My Gut. If I'm Serious About Understanding The World, Thinking With Anything Besides My Brain, As Tempting As That Might Be, Is Likely To Get Me Into Trouble.

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

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.

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.

Science Is Not Only Compatible With Spirituality; It Is A Profound Source Of Spirituality.

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 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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

We Are Star Stuff Harvesting Sunlight.

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

Theoretical Physics

If Intelligence Is Our Only Edge, We Must Learn To Use It Better, To Shape It, To Understand Its Limitations And Deficiencies -- To Use It As Cats Use Stealth, As Katydids Use Camouflage -- To Make It The Tool Of Our Survival.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There Are Huge Advertising Budgets Only When There's No Difference Between The Products. If The Products Really Were Different, People Would Buy The One That's Better. Advertising Teaches People Not To Trust Their Judgment. Advertising Teaches People To Be Stupid.

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.

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

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

This Oak Tree And Me, We're Made Of The Same Stuff.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Absolute Certainty Will Always Elude Us. We Will Always Be Mired In Error. The Most Each Generation Can Hope For Is To Reduce The Error. . . .

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 Were Wanderers From The Beginning.

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.

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

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.

I'm Only A Four-dimensional Creature. Haven't Got A Clue How To Visualise Infinity. Even Einstein Hadn't. I Know Because I Asked Him

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There Is No Other Species On Earth That Does Science. It Is, So Far, Entirely A Human Invention, Evolved By Natural Selection In The Cerebral Cortex For One Simple Reason: It Works. It 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.

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.

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

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

Nobody Listens To Mathematicians.

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

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.

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

Dangerous World

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.

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

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

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

Valid Criticism Does You A Favor.

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

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

The Absence Of Evidence Is Not The Evidence Of Absence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Can Always Take But Never Give.

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

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.

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

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

In The Middle 1970s An Astronomer I Admire Put Together A Modest Manifesto Called "objections To Astrology" And Asked Me To Endorse It. I Struggled With His Wording, And In The End Found Myself Unable To Sign, Not Because I Thought Astrology Has Any Validity Whatever, But Because I Felt (and Still Feel) That The Tone Of The Statement Was Authoritarian.

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

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.

All Of The Books In The World Contain No More Information Than Is Broadcast As Video In A Single Large American City In A Single Year. Not All Bits Have Equal Value.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If God Is Omnipotent And Omniscient, Why Didn't He Start The Universe Out In The First Place So It Would Come Out The Way He Wants? Why's He Constantly Repairing And Complaining? No, There's One Thing The Bible Makes Clear: The Biblical God Is A Sloppy Manufacturer. He's Not Good At Design, He's Not Good At Execution. He'd Be Out Of Business, If There Was Any Competition.

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

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

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.

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

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

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