We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties.
According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters.
This zest to explore and exploit, however thoughtless its agents may have been, has clear survival value. It is not restricted to any one nation or ethnic group. It is an endowment that all members of the human species hold in common.
Otto Warburg had, half a century before, proposed that oxidation was the cause of many cancers.
We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologyzing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections.
It would seem that our intelligence is the source of our unhappiness in an almost literal way; but it would also imply that our unhappiness is the source of our strength as a species.
Vast migrations of people -some voluntary, most not- have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression and famine today than at any other time in human history.
Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us.
Somewhere else there might be very exotic biologies and technologies and societies. In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding, we are a little lonely; and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.
Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason: Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.
Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. And you have to know it in exquisite detail.
An oak tree and I are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor. The.
Would you say, “Billy, be home by the time the Earth has rotated enough so as to occult the Sun below the local horizon”? Billy would be long gone before you’re finished.
Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. Intelligent beings can solve problems better, live longer, and leave more offspring. Until the invention of nuclear weapons, intelligence powerfully aided survival.
The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true.
In a novel of ideas, the ideas have to work.
No Green Revolution, no hydroponics, no making the deserts bloom can beat an exponential population growth.
As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse.
Being freed from superstition isn’t enough for science to grow. One must also have the idea of interrogating Nature, of doing experiments.