All of us long for a competent, uncorrupt, charismtatic leader. We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good.
The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.
Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, “Gentlemen, let’s proceed,” and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, “Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys.” The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female.
Let’s see if I got this right,” she would say to herself. “I’ve taken an inert gas that’s in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he’s the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He’s representing us. And them. It’s that madman’s dream come true.
The most brilliant youngsters are a national and a global resource.
And were the vision of Democritus to have been adopted by Western civilization, instead of being cast aside for the pale views of Plato and Aristotle, we would be vastly further ahead today, in.
The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.
Of course we all would like to foretell the future and make contact with the gods.
A still more glorious dawn awaits.
Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it’s accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It’s a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge.
We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity.
If anything like this is true, then we would be denied even our self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that makes self-congratulatory distinctions.
Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins – the small brain proteins with morphinelike effects – can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it’s an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry. As.
By far the most exciting, satisfying and exhilarating time to be alive is the time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge on these fundamental issues; the age where we begin in wonder and end in understanding. In all of the four-billion-year history of life on our planet, in all of the four-million-year history of the human family, there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours.
And all I’m saying is that it is within our capability to survive. I don’t guarantee it. Prophecy is a lost art. And I don’t know what the probabilities are that we will go one way or another. And no one says it’s easy. But it is clear, as Einstein said, that if we do not make a change in our way of thinking, all is lost.
If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it’s not surprising that occasionally we’ll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn’t find one here and there.
Each time it happens we’re tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker.
A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties. Old slogans and hatreds are dusted off. What was only recently muttered guiltily is now offered as political axiom and agenda.