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?
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.
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.
Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand.
The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.
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?
Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human.
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?
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.
Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.
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.
Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best we have.
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.
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.
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.
We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.
Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes.
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.
Otherwise we don’t run the government the government runs us.