Sublime

“Nature shows us only the tail of the lion,” he stated, suggesting that there’s something more to what we see as reality, even if we can’t see it from our particular cosmic vantage point.

Half the population was below average intelligence.

His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the

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A Universe without life is a dead Universe. A Universe without minds has no memory. A Universe without memory has no history. The dawn of humanity marked the dawn of a mindful Universe, a Universe that after 13.8 billion years of quiet expansion found a voice to tell its story.

The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.

Sagan wrote of it, in the book inspired by the photograph, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.... Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

Human civilization, he felt, will soon strain the resources of our small planet. That will confront us with a choice: accept static growth or expand to places beyond Earth. “I don’t think stasis is compatible with liberty,” he says. “We can fix that problem in exactly one way: by moving out into the solar system.”

Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws.