Quotes

"The improver of natural science absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin."

~ THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

"The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems."

~ G.W. ALLPORT

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

~ ISAAC ASIMOV

"Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.

~ LEON LEDERMAN

"Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts."

~ GEORGE SANTAYANA

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."

~ ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet."

~ STEPHEN HAWKING

"An advanced civilization pushing its ecological limits would, almost by definition, not waste both matter and energy. Yet we see such waste in all directions, as far as we can see spiral galaxies: their spiral arms hold dust clouds made of wasted matter, backlit by wasted starlight... The idea that humanity is alone in the visible universe is consistent with what we see in the sky...

"Sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self-replicating entities into the environment."

~ MICHAEL CRICHTON

"At the present rate of scientific and technological progress, there is a real chance that we will have molecular manufacturing or superhuman artificial intelligence well within the first half of this century. Now, this creates some considerable promises and dangers. In a worst-case scenario, intelligent life could go extinct."

~ NICK BOSTROM

"The Fermi Paradox refers to the question mark that hovers over the data point that we have seen no signs of extraterrestrial life. This tells us that it is not the case that life evolves on a significant fraction of Earth-like planets and proceeds to develop advanced technology, using it to colonize the universe in ways that would have been detected with our current instrumentation. There must be (at least) one Great Filter — an evolutionary step that is extremely improbable — somewhere on the line between Earth-like planet and colonizing-in-detectable-ways civilization. If the Great Filter isn't in our past, we must fear it in our (near) future. Maybe nearly every civilization that develops a certain level of technology causes its own extinction."

~ NICK BOSTROM

"If we get a second toehold in the solar system in the next 100 years, we will have gone a long ways toward ensuring the long-term viability of the human species."

~ ARTHUR C. CLARK

"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."

~ ALBERT EINSTEIN

"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."

~ SOCRATES

"The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."

~ HAL 9000, 2001: A Space Odyssey