Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. ‘For Man is a giddy thing,’ teaches William Shakespeare.
For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
If scientists can be fooled on the question of the simple interpretation of straightforward data of the sort that they are routinely obtaining from other kinds of astronomical objects, when the stakes are high, when the emotional predispositions are working, what must be the situation where the evidence is much weaker, where the will to believe is much greater, where the skeptical scientific tradition has hardly made a toehold – namely, in the area of religion?
Haldane imagined a far future when the stars have darkened and space is mainly filled with a cold thin gas. Nevertheless, if we wait long enough statistical fluctuations in the density of this gas will occur. Over immense periods of time the fluctuations will be sufficient to reconstitute a Universe something like our own. If the Universe is infinitely old, there will be an infinite number of such reconstitutions, Haldane pointed out.
Such stories include Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Fear of death, which in some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes – or even for those who just did what those in authority told them – might gain a competitive advantage.
And therefore I would say that the first thing to do is to realize that governments, all governments, at least on occasion, lie. And some of them do it all the time – some of them do it only every second statement – but, by and large, governments distort the facts in order to remain in office.
We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Clause.
Pre-scientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. Field interrogation of informants from a different culture is not always easy.
The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system.
Scientific insight made him feel something, a soaring sensation, a recognition that he could only compare to falling in love. And as he used to say: “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.
Early in my studies, I was amazed and disappointed that such a view had ever been taken seriously, that for planets of other stars, absence of evidence had been considered evidence of absence.
A little deeper was a fear of falling in love without reservation, of committing herself to someone who might then be snatched from her. Or simply leave her. But if you never really fall in love, you can never really miss it.
National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real.
Isn’t it confusing to have the same name as that scientist guy?” It took me a moment to understand. Was he pulling my leg? Finally, it dawned on me. “I am that scientist guy,” I answered. He paused and then smiled. “Sorry. That’s my problem. I thought it was yours too.
There was a time before television, before motion pictures, before radio, before books. The greatest part of human existence was spent in such a time.
Are the worlds of more advanced civilizations totally geometrized, entirely rebuilt by their inhabitants? Or would the signature of really advanced civilization be that they left no sign at all?
They should have sent a poet.
In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the Universe.
One consequence of this train of argument is that, even if civilizations commonly arise on planets throughout the Galaxy, few of them will be both long-lived and nontechnological. Since hazards from asteroids and comets must apply to inhabited planets all over the Galaxy, if there are such, intelligent beings everywhere will have to unify their home worlds politically, leave their planets, and move small nearby worlds around. Their eventual choice, as ours, is spaceflight or extinction.
An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books – might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?