If we are to send people, it must be for a very good reason – and with a realistic understanding that almost certainly we will lose lives. Astronauts and Cosmonauts have always understood this. Nevertheless, there has been and will be no shortage of volunteers.
Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.
To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.
Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up – the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains – were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.
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.
Our particular causality scheme has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it is far inferior to what might have been, and may one day be.
It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put human face on random cosmic violence.
Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood.
At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitueds – 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.
The American and Russian capabilities in space science and technology mesh; they interdigitate. Each is strong where the other is weak. This is a marriage made in heaven – but one that has been surprisingly difficult to consummate.
For thousands of years humans were oppressed – as some of us still are – by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.
Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.
Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for.
La prueba de ausencia no es prueba de ausencia.
Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing.
Thus, 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.
If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor.
The chief danger of adopting a credible pose of irrationality is that to succeed in the pretense you have to be very good. After a while, you get used to it. It becomes pretense no longer.
Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there’s no turning back from science.
If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans?