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?
Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse
The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.
The 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.
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.
In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work.
For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof?
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.
In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.
I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.
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.
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.
Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.
Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television.
I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space.
The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.
[S]cience has itself become a kind of religion.
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.
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.
...the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue of which we might anticipate widespread skepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil... compelling testimony ... provides that our personality, character, memory ... resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence.
We are the children equally of the Sky and the Earth.
In more than one respect, the exploring of the Solar System and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history.
If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off.
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.
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