“Life looks for life.” Carl Sagan
Showing posts tagged life
Showing posts tagged life
“Life looks for life.” Carl Sagan

“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” Stanley Kubrick

“The evolution of complex life, its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws is wonderfully surprising, or would be, up for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. Our existence is desperately surprising. Natural selection produces living organisms which are entities of gigantic but not infinite probability. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules which would normally would made nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, have some how manage to gather them selves together into chunks of rock size matter, capable in some cases of thinking and feeling and falling in love yet other chunks of complex matter. What we see of the real world, in a sense is not the unvarnished real world, but a model of the real world regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so is useful for dealing with real world. The nature of the model in our head depends of the kind of animal we are.” Richard Dawkins

“Science is too important not to be part of popular culture. It is, as Carl Sagan always emphasized, "it is absolutely the foundation of our society, we live in a scientific society”, so to have a society where science is some how divorced from the rest of culture is seems to me as Sagan said again “Anti-democratic”. It is anti-democratic cause you have people who live in democracy who lives are controlled by scientific decisions. If they no nothing about the science, then there is a democratic deficit. And you have problems because society can make decisions that are not based on reason.“ Professor Brian Cox
