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Consider this pronouncement from a British Defence Department spokesman as reported in the London Observer for February 26, 1978: “Any messages transmitted from outer space are the responsibility of the BBC and the Post Office. It is their responsibility to track down illegal broadcasts.”
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.
Many of the American and European émigré scientists who developed the first nuclear weapons were profoundly distressed about the demon they had let loose on the world. They pleaded for the global abolition of nuclear weapons. But their pleas went unheeded;
According to one estimate, the corporate profits in military weapons procurement are 30 to 50 percent higher than in an equally technological but competitive civilian market.
According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters.
Military secrecy makes the military the most difficult sector of any society for the citizens to monitor. If we do not know what they do, it is very hard for us to stop them.
We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?
Full-scale nuclear war has never happened. Somehow this is taken to imply that it never will. But we can experience it only once. By then it will be too late to reformulate the statistics.
Microbiologists and physicians study diseases mainly to cure people. Rarely are they rooting for the pathogen.
Let us study war as if it were, as Einstein aptly called it, an illness of childhood.
We, the nuclear hostages—all the peoples of the Earth—must educate ourselves about conventional and nuclear warfare. Then we must educate our governments.
performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence. Even societies without notable fondling of infants develop nonviolent adults, provided sexual activity in adolescents is not repressed. Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived—during at least one of two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence—of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft,
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Prescott writes: “The percent likelihood of a society becoming physically violent if it is physically affectionate toward its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent. The probability of this relationship occurring by chance is 125,000 to one. I am not aware of any other developmental variable that has such a high degree of predictive validity.”
More work on this provocative thesis is clearly needed. Meanwhile, we can each make a personal and noncontroversial contribution to the future of the world by hugging our infants tenderly.
Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species.
Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Theophrastus was right. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.
has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.
No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.
When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them.
Referring to the Library of Alexandria and the fact that it's caretakers did not share the great store of knowledge with the public. Kind of like what we have now with people believing all kinds of crap.
But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
If this doesn't give you the chills of realization of how precious we all are, there is something seriously wrong with you.
Space exploration—unmanned and manned—uses many of the same technological and organizational skills and demands the same commitment to valor and daring as does the enterprise of war. Should a time of real disarmament arrive before nuclear war, such exploration would enable the military-industrial establishments of the major powers to engage at long last in an untainted enterprise. Interests vested in preparations for war can relatively easily be reinvested in the exploration of the Cosmos.
Some 3.6 million years ago, in what is now northern Tanzania, a volcano erupted, the resulting cloud of ash covering the surrounding savannahs. In 1979, the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found in that ash footprints—the footprints, she believes, of an early hominid, perhaps an ancestor of all the people on the Earth today. And 380,000 kilometers away, in a flat dry plain that humans have in a moment of optimism called the Sea of Tranquility, there is another footprint, left by the first human to walk another world. We have come far in 3.6 million years, and in 4.6 billion and in 15 billion.
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.
His Emmy and Peabody–winning television series, Cosmos, became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television.
