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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.

-Carl Sagan

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Writing Is Perhaps The

Carl Sagan

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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.

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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

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.

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.

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?]

We Are, In A Way, Temporary Ambulatory Repositories For Our Nucleic Acids. This Does Not Deny Our Humanity; It Does Not Prevent Us From Pursuing The Good, The True And The Beautiful. But It Would Be A Great Mistake To Ignore Where We Have Come From In Our Attempt To Determine Where We Are Going.

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.

All Civilizations Become Either Spacefaring Or Extinct.

There Is Much That Science Doesn't Understand, Many Mysteries Still To Be Resolved. In A Universe Tens Of Billions Of Light-years Across And Some Ten Or Fifteen Billion Years Old, This May Be The Case Forever. We Are Constantly Stumbling On New Surprises

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

When You Look More Generally At Life On Earth, You Find That It Is All The Same Kind Of Life. There Are Not Many Different Kinds; There's Only One Kind. It Uses About Fifty Fundamental Biological Building Blocks, Organic Molecules.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

There Is Never Only One Of Anything In Nature.

Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Proof.

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

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.

Nobody Listens To Mathematicians.

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.

Finding The Occasional Straw Of Truth Awash In A Great Ocean Of Confusion And Bamboozle Requires Intelligence, Vigilance, Dedication, And Courage. But If We Don't Practice These Tough Habits Of Thought, We Cannot Hope To Solve The Truly Serious Problems That Face Us --- And We Risk Becoming A Nation Of Suckers, Up For Grabs By The Next Charlatan Who Comes Along.

If You Look At Earth From Space You See A Dot, That's Here. That's Home. That's Us. It Underscores The Responsibility To Deal More Kindly And Compassionately With One Another And To Preserve And Cherish That Pale Blue Dot, The Only Home We've Ever Known.

The Apollo Pictures Of The Whole Earth Conveyed To Multitudes Something Well Known To Astronomers: On The Scale Of The Worlds - To Say Nothing Of Stars Or Galaxies - Humans Are Inconsequential, A Thin Film Of Life On An Obscure And Solitary Lump Of Rock And Metal

With Insufficient Data It Is Easy To Go Wrong.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

We Are All Star Stuff.

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

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.

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

We Are A Way Of The Universe Knowing Itself.

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

Optical Illusions

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?

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

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

'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.'

One Trend That Bothers Me Is The Glorification Of Stupidity, That The Media Is Reassuring People It's Alright Not To Know Anything. That To Me Is Far More Dangerous Than A Little Pornography On The Internet.

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.

Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known.

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?"

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

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.

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.

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

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

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

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.

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

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

One Of The Great Commandments Of Science Is, 'mistrust Arguments From Authority'. (scientists, Being Primates, And Thus Given To Dominance Hierarchies, Of Course Do Not Always Follow This Commandment.)

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

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.

Eratosthenes's Only Tools Were Sticks, Eyes, Feet, And Brains; Plus A Zest For Experiment. With Those Tools He Correctly Deduced The Circumference Of The Earth, To High Precision, With An Error Of Only A Few Percent. That's Pretty Good Figuring For 2200 Years Ago.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

We Wish To Find The Truth, No Matter Where It Lies. But To Find The Truth We Need Imagination And Skepticism Both. We Will Not Be Afraid To Speculate, But We Will Be Careful To Distinguish Speculation From Fact.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The Desire To Be Connected With The Cosmos Reflects A Profound Reality, But We Are Connected; Not In The Trivial Ways That Astrology Promises, But In The Deepest Ways.

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 Are...capable Of Using Our Compassion And Our Intelligence, Our Technology And Our Wealth, To Make An Abundant And Meaningful Life For Every Inhabitant Of This Planet. To Enhance Enormously Our Understanding Of The Universe, And To Carry Us To The Stars.

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.

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

The Universe Is Not Required To Be In Perfect Harmony With Human Ambition.

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

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. . . .

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

Even Today The Most Jaded City Dweller Can Be Unexpectedly Moved Upon Encountering A Clear Night Sky Studded With Thousands Of Twinkling Stars. When It Happens To Me After All These Years It Still Takes My Breath Away.

The 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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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'

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. They Avoid Rather Than Confront The World. But Those With The Courage To Explore The Weave And Structure Of The Cosmos, Even Where It Differs Profoundly From Their Wishes And Prejudices, Will Penetrate Its Deepest Mysteries.

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

Personally, I Would Be Delighted If There Were A Life After Death, Especially If It Permitted Me To Continue To Learn About This World And Others, If It Gave Me A Chance To Discover How History Turns Out.

The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is A Kind Of Skywriting. At First It Seemed To Spell Out Our Continuing Complacency Before A Witch's Brew Of Deadly Perils. But Perhaps It Really Tells Of A Newfound Talent To Work Together To Protect The Global Environment.

My Deeply Held Belief Is That If A God Of Anything Like The Traditional Sort Exists, Our Curiosity And Intelligence Is Provided By Such A God. We Would Be Unappreciative Of That Gift If We Suppressed Our Passion To Explore The Universe And Ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Think Of How Many Religions Attempt To Validate Themselves With Prophecy. Think Of How Many People Rely On These Prophecies, However Vague, However Unfulfilled, To Support Or Prop Up Their Beliefs. Yet Has There Ever Been A Religion With The Prophetic Accuracy And Reliability Of Science? ... No Other Human Institution Comes Close.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

We Are The Custodians Of Life's Meaning.

In Science It Often Happens That Scientists Say, 'you Know That's A Really Good Argument; My Position Is Mistaken,' And Then They Would Actually Change Their Minds And You Never Hear That Old View From Them Again. They Really Do It. It Doesn't Happen As Often As It Should, Because Scientists Are Human And Change Is Sometimes Painful. But It Happens Every Day. I Cannot Recall The Last Time Something Like That Happened In Politics Or Religion.

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.

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

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.

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.

Some Racists Still Reject The Plain Testimony Written In The Dna That All The Races Are Not Only Human But Nearly Indistinguishable. . . .

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 Idea That God Is An Oversized White Male With A Flowing Beard, Who Sits In The Sky And Tallies The Fall Of Every Sparrow Is Ludicrous. But If By 'god,' One Means The Set Of Physical Laws That Govern The Universe, Then Clearly There Is Such A God. This God Is Emotionally Unsatisfying... It Does Not Make Much Sense To Pray To The Law Of Gravity.

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.

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

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

Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense The Stirring Of A Breeze.

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

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?

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.

Extinction Is The Rule. Survival Is The Exception.

Mass Extinction

Exception To The Rule

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?

We Humans Look Rather Different From A Tree. Without A Doubt We Perceive The World Differently Than A Tree Does. But Down Deep, At The Molecular Heart Of Life, The Trees And We Are Essentially Identical.

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.

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

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.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

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.

Books Tap The Wisdom Of Our Species -- The Greatest Minds, The Best Teachers -- From All Over The World And From All Our History. And They're Patient.

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.

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.

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.

Science Is A Way To Not Fool Ourselves.

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.

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.

Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions.

Science Arouses A Soaring Sense Of Wonder. But So Does Pseudoscience. Sparse And Poor Popularizations Of Science Abandon Ecological Niches That Pseudoscience Promptly Fills. If It Were Widely Understood That Claims To Knowledge Require Adequate Evidence Before They Can Be Accepted, There Would Be No Room For Pseudoscience.

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.

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

Books Are Key To Understanding The World And Participating In A Democratic Society.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Too Much Openness And You Accept Every Notion, Idea, And Hypothesis-which Is Tantamount To Knowing Nothing. Too Much Skepticism-especially Rejection Of New Ideas Before They Are Adequately Tested-and You're Not Only Unpleasantly Grumpy, But Also Closed To The Advance Of Science. A Judicious Mix Is What We Need.

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.

Valid Criticism Does You A Favor.

The Dumbing Down Of American Is Most Evident In The Slow Decay Of Substantive Content In The Enormously Influential Media, The 30 Second Sound Bites (now Down To 10 Seconds Or Less), Lowest Common Denominator Programming, Credulous Presentations On Pseudoscience And Superstition, But Especially A Kind Of Celebration Of Ignorance.

The Universe Forces Those Who Live In It To Understand It.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Who Will Speak For Planet Earth?

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

An Atheist Is Someone Who Is Certain That God Does Not Exist, Someone Who Has Compelling Evidence Against The Existence Of God. I Know Of No Such Compelling Evidence.

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.

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, And Albert Einstein Made Serious Mistakes. But The Scientific Enterprise Arranges Things So That Teamwork Prevails: What One Of Us, Even The Most Brilliant Among Us, Misses, Another Of Us, Even Someone Much Less Celebrated And Capable, May Detect And Rectify.

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

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

If The Press Descended, The Science Would Surely Suffer.

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

We Have Begun To Contemplate Our Origins: Starstuff Pondering The Stars; Organized Assemblages Of Ten Billion Billion Billion Atoms Considering The Evolution Of Atoms; Tracing The Long Journey By Which, Here At Least, Consciousness Arose.

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

Quickly Capping 363 Oil Well Fires In A War Zone Is Impossible. The Fires Would Burn Out Of Control Until They Put Themselves Out... The Resulting Soot Might Well Stretch Over All Of South Asia... It Could Be Carried Around The World... [and] The Consequences Could Be Dire. Beneath Such A Pall Sunlight Would Be Dimmed, Temperatures Lowered And Droughts More Frequent. Spring And Summer Frosts May Be Expected... This Endangerment Of The Food Supplies... Appears To Be Likely Enough That It Should Affect The War Plans.

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.

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.

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 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.

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