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The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal

Carl Sagan

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Carl Sagan
Age: 62 †
Born: 1934
Born: November 9
Died: 1996
Died: December 20
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Physicist
Planetary Scientist
Science Communicator
Brooklyn
New York
Carl Edward Sagan
Sagan
Carl E. Sagan
Carl E Sagan
C. E. Sagan
C.E. Sagan
C E Sagan
C. Sagan
C Sagan
Sagan C
Sagan C.
Sagan C. E.
Sagan CE
Whole
Stars
Thin
Astronomers
Something
Known
Solitary
Lumps
Life
Film
Scale
Apollo
World
Earth
Worlds
Galaxy
Wells
Scales
Multitudes
Conveyed
Humans
Pictures
Metal
Galaxies
Well
Rock
Metals
Inconsequential
Nothing
Rocks
Obscure
Lump

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A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
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If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?
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A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way
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Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.
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The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.
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These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.
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The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
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The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
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I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.
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A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.
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Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).
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We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.
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If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
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Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spendtime wondering why nature is the way it is . . .
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If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
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It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
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Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.
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The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.
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If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be?
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We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.
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