We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re being asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
There is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us.
Human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth. It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable.
Reality is always greater – much greater – than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.
That’s human nature. Nobody does anything until it’s too late.
Although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of nature, what humans really want to know is why things work. Children don’t ask how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue.
Increasingly, people perceive no difference between the narcissistic self-serving reporters asking questions, and the narcissistic self-serving politicians who evade them.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
If you gamble long enough, you’ll always lose – the gambler is always ruined.
At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.
The rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark.
Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they’ll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.
It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see.
Nobody is driven by abstractions like ’seeking truth.
Keep working. Don’t wait for inspiration. Work inspires inspiration. Keep working.
Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we’re a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that’s our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.
Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years – the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.
Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.
You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same, whatever specific form their fanaticism takes.