I Believe Our Future Depends Powerfully On

It Will Not Be We Who Reach Alpha Centauri, And The Other Nearby Stars. It Will Be A Species Very Like Us - But With More Of Our Strengths And Fewer Of Our Weaknesses.

There Is Perhaps No Better A Demonstration Of The Folly Of Human Conceits Than This Distant Image Of Our Tiny World.

We've Tended In Our Cosmologies To Make Things Familiar. Despite All Our Best Efforts, We've Not Been Very Inventive. In The West, Heaven Is Placid And Fluffy, And Hell Is Like The Inside Of A Volcano. In Many Stories, Both Realms Are Governed By Dominance Hierarchies Headed By Gods Or Devils. Monotheists Talked About The King Of Kings. In Every Culture We Imagined Something Like Our Own Political System Running The Universe. Few Found The Similarity Suspicious.

We Are Not Smart Enough To Decide Which Pieces Of Knowledge Are Permissible And Which Are Not.

Any Sufficiently Crisp Question Can Be Answered By A Single Binary Digit-0 Or 1, Yes Or No.