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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.

-Carl Sagan

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What Is Called For

Carl Sagan

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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.

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All Of Us Cherish Our Beliefs. They Are, To A Degree, Self-defining. When Someone Comes Along Who Challenges Our Belief System As Insufficiently Well-based - Or Who, Like Socrates, Merely Asks Embarrassing Questions That We Haven't Thought Of, Or Demonstrates That We've Swept Key Underlying Assumptions Under The Rug - It Becomes Much More Than A Search For Knowledge. It Feels Like A Personal Assault.

Embarrassing Questions

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

All Over The World There Are Enormous Numbers Of Smart, Even Gifted, People Who Harbor A Passion For Science. But That Passion Is Unrequited. Surveys Suggest That Some 95% Of Americans Are "scientifically Illiterate." That's...the Same Fraction...of Slaves Who Were Illiterate Before The Civil War.

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

If You Are Only Skeptical, Then No New Ideas Make It Through To You.

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.

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

Nobody Listens To Mathematicians.

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.

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

A Tiny Blue Dot Set In A Sunbeam. Here It Is. That's Where We Live. That's Home. We Humans Are One Species And This Is Our World. It Is Our Responsibility To Cherish It. Of All The Worlds In Our Solar System, The Only One So Far As We Know, Graced By Life.

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.

There Are Naive Questions, Tedious Questions, Ill-phrased Questions, Questions Put After Inadequate Self-criticism. But Every Question Is A Cry To Understand The World. There Is No Such Thing As A Dumb Question.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Knowing A Great Deal Is Not The Same As Being Smart; Intelligence Is Not Information Alone But Also Judgement, The Manner In Which Information Is Coordinated And Used.

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.

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.

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.

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?]

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.

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.

[s]cience Has Itself Become A Kind Of Religion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He Sought A Way To Preserve The Past. John Hershel Was One Of The Founders Of A New Form Of Time Travel.... A Means To Capture Light And Memories. He Actually Coined A Word For It... Photography. When You Think About It, Photography Is A Form Of Time Travel. This Man Is Staring At Us From Across The Centuries, A Ghost Preserved By Light.

The Hindu Religion Is The Only Of The World's Great Faiths Dedicated To The Idea That The Cosmos Itself Undergoes An Immense, Indeed An Infinite, Number Of Deaths And Rebirths.

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'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

If Chimpanzees Have Consciousness, If They Are Capable Of Abstractions, Do They Not Have What Until Now Has Been Described As 'human Rights'? How Smart Does A Chimp Have To Be Before Killing Him Constitutes Murder?

War Is Murder Writ Large.

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

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

If I Finish A Book A Week, I Will Read Only A Few Thousand Books In My Lifetime, About A Tenth Of A Percent Of The Contents Of The Greatest Libraries Of Our Time. The Trick Is To Know Which Books To Read.

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.

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

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

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

How Is It That Hardly Any Major Religion Has Looked At Science And Concluded, “this Is Better Than We Thought! The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant?

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

For All I Know We May Be Visited By A Different Extraterrestrial Civilization Every Second Tuesday, But There's No Support For This Appealing Idea. The Extraordinary Claims Are Not Supported By Extraordinary Evidence.

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.

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

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

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

All Inquiries Carry With Them Some Element Of Risk.

Stars Are Phoenixes, Rising From Their Own Ashes.

How Is It That Hardly Any Major Religion Has Looked At Science And Concluded, “this Is Better Than We Thought! The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant?” Instead They Say, “no, No, No! My God Is A Little God, And I Want Him To Stay That Way.” A Religion, Old Or New, That Stressed The Magnificence Of The Universe As Revealed By Modern Science Might Be Able To Draw Forth Reserves Of Reverence And Awe Hardly Tapped By The Conventional Faiths.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is.

What Began In Deadly Competition Has Helped Us To See That Global Cooperation Is The Essential Precondition For Our Survival. Travel Is Broadening. It's Time To Hit The Road Again.

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.

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.

Real Patriots Ask Questions.

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

A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits / Not A Sunrise, But A Galaxy-rise / A Morning Filled With 400 Billion Suns / The Rising Of The Milky Way

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 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.

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.

There Is A Lurking Fear That Some Things Are Not “meant" To Be Known, That Some Inquiries Are Too Dangerous For Human Beings To Make.

Keeping Secrets

Some Things Are Meant To Be

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.

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

It's Sometimes Easier To Reject Strong Evidence Than To Admit That We've Been Wrong, This Is Information About Ourselves Worth Having.

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.

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 Organism At War With Itself Is Doomed.

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

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

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.

Ask Courageous Questions. Do Not Be Satisfied With Superficial Answers. Be Open To Wonder And At The Same Time Subject All Claims To Knowledge, Without Exception, To Intense Skeptical Scrutiny. Be Aware Of Human Fallibility. Cherish Your Species And Your Planet.

We Invest Far Off Places With A Certain Romance... Long Summers, Mild Winters, Rich Harvests, Plentiful Game; None Of Them Lasts For Ever. Your Own Life, Or Your Bands, Or Even Your Species - Might Be Owed To A Restless Few, Drawn By A Craving They Can Hardly Articulate Or Understand, To Undiscovered Lands, And New Worlds.

Extinction Is The Rule. Survival Is The Exception.

Mass Extinction

Exception To The Rule

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.

There Are Many Hypotheses In Physics Of Almost Comparable Brillance And Elegance That Have Been Rejected Because They Did Not Survive Such A Confrontation With Experiment. In My View, The Human Condition Would Be Greatly Improved If Such Confrontations And Willingness To Reject Hypotheses Were A Regular Part Of Our Social, Political, Economic, Religious And Cultural Lives.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Every Kid Starts Out As A Natural-born Scientist, And Then We Beat It Out Of Them. A Few Trickle Through The System With Their Wonder And Enthusiasm For Science Intact.

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?

We Are The Custodians Of Life's Meaning.

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?

There Is A Report That Says That Kids Who Watch Violent Tv Programs Tend To Be More Violent When They Grow Up. But Did The Tv Cause The Violence, Or Do Violent Children Preferentially Enjoy Watching Violent Programs?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

An Atheist Has To Know A Lot More Than I Know. An Atheist Is Someone Who Knows There Is No God. By Some Definitions Atheism Is Very Stupid.

There Is No God

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

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

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

We Are All Star Stuff.

If We're Capable Of Conjuring Up Terrifying Monsters In Childhood, Why Shouldn't Some Of Us, At Least On Occasion, Be Able To Fantasize Something Similar, Something Truly Horrifying, A Shared Delusion, As Adults?

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

Be Grateful Everyday For The Brief But Magnificent Opportunity That Life Provides.

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

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

The 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.

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.

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

We've Tended In Our Cosmologies To Make Things Familiar. Despite All Our Best Efforts, We've Not Been Very Inventive. In The West, Heaven Is Placid And Fluffy, And Hell Is Like The Inside Of A Volcano. In Many Stories, Both Realms Are Governed By Dominance Hierarchies Headed By Gods Or Devils. Monotheists Talked About The King Of Kings. In Every Culture We Imagined Something Like Our Own Political System Running The Universe. Few Found The Similarity Suspicious.

Modern Darwinism Makes It Abundantly Clear That Many Less Ruthless Traits, Some Not Always Admired By Robber Barons And Fuhrers - Altruism, General Intelligence, Compassion - May Be The Key To Survival.

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

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

Some 5 Billion Years From Now, There Will Be A Last Perfect Day On Earth... Then The Sun Will Begin To Die, Life Will Be Extinguished, The Oceans Will Boil And Evaporate Away.

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

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.

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

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

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

The Prediction Of Nuclear Winter Is Drawn Not, Of Course, From Any Direct Experience With The Consequences Of Global Nuclear War, But Rather From An Investigation Of The Governing Physics.

If The Press Descended, The Science Would Surely Suffer.

Maybe It's A Little Early. Maybe The Time Is Not Quite Yet. But Those Other Worlds - Promising Untold Opportunities - Beckon. Silently, They Orbit The Sun, Waiting.

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

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

We Can Always Take But Never Give.

We Are Not Smart Enough To Decide Which Pieces Of Knowledge Are Permissible And Which Are Not.

We Are All Made Up Of Star Stuff.

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

It Would Be Wryly Interesting If In Human History The Cultivation Of Marijuana Led Generally To The Invention Of Agriculture, And Thereby To Civilization.

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

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

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

But, Jefferson Worried That The People - And The Argument Goes Back To Thucydides And Aristotle - Are Easily Misled. He Also Stressed, Passionately And Repeatedly, That It Was Essential For The People To Understand The Risks And Benefits Of Government, To Educate Themselves, And To Involve Themselves In The Political Process. Without That, He Said, The Wolves Will Take Over.

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

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.

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

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.

The Cosmos Is All That Is Or Ever Was Or Ever Will Be.

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

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

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

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

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

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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?

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.

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.

You Mean Am I For It Or Against It? You Think This Is A Key Question I'm Going To Be Asked On Vega, And You Want To Make Sure I Give The Right Answer? Okay. Overpopulation Is Why I'm In Favor Of Homosexuality And A Celibate Clergy. A Celibate Clergy Is An Especially Good Idea, Because It Tends To Suppress Any Hereditary Propensity Toward Fanaticism.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Many Statements About God Are Confidently Made By Theologians On Grounds That Today At Least Sound Specious. Thomas Aquinas Claimed To Prove That God Cannot Make Another God, Or Commit Suicide, Or Make A Man Without A Soul, Or Even Make A Triangle Whose Interior Angles Do Not Equal 180 Degrees. But Bolyai And Lobachevsky Were Able To Accomplish This Last Feat (on A Curved Surface) In The Nineteenth Century, And They Were Not Even Approximately Gods.

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

The Illegality Of Cannabis Is Outrageous.

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

There Is Never Only One Of Anything In Nature.

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

We Are The Universe Experiencing Itself.

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?"

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.

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

My Deeply Held Belief Is That If A God Of Anything Like The Traditional Sort Exists, Our Curiosity And Intelligence Are Provided By Such A God. We Would Be Unappreciative Of Those Gifts (as Well As Unable To Take Such A Course Of Action) If We Suppressed Our Passion To Explore The Universe And Ourselves. On The Other Hand, If Such A Traditional God Does Not Exist, Our Curiosity And Our Intelligence Are The Essential Tools For Managing Our Survival. In Either Case, The Enterprise Of Knowledge Is Consistent With Both Science And Religion, And Is Essential For The Welfare Of The Human Species.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Science Is A Way To Not Fool Ourselves.

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 All A Matter Of Time Scale. An Event That Would Be Unthinkable In A Hundred Years May Be Inevitable In A Hundred Million.

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.

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

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.

Nothing Disturbs Me More Than The Glorification Of Stupidity.

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.

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.

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

.. Think Of The Rivers Of Blood Spilled By All Those Generals And Emperors So That In Glory And In Triumph They Could Become The 'momentary' Masters Of A 'fraction' Of A 'dot'

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.

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.

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

You Have To Know The Past To Understand The Present.

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 Universe Seems Neither Benign Nor Hostile, Merely Indifferent.

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

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

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