In The 1970s, I Think That There

We May Be Living At That Moment, On The Cusp, When We Go From Being A Species That Feels A Kind Of Loneliness In The Cosmos To Actually One Sometime In The Not Too Distant Future Being Able To Confirm The Existence Of Other Intelligent Life.

As A Species, We Tend To Lie Quite A Bit - To Ourselves And To Each Other. It's A Primate Thing. So, A Reason To Go Into A Career In Science And Technology, Or To Learn More About These Subjects, Is To Become A More Powerful Person.

I've Been Thinking About The Distorted View Of Science That Prevails In Our Culture. I've Been Wondering About This, Because Our Civilization Is Completely Dependent On Science And High Technology, Yet Most Of Us Are Alienated From Science.

I Remember That One Time Carl Sagan Was Giving A Talk, And He Spelled Out, In A Kind Of Withering Succession, These Great Theories Of Demotion That Science Has Dealt Us, All Of The Ways In Which Science Is Telling Us We Are Not Who We Would Like To Believe We Are. At The End Of It, A Young Man Came Up To Him And He Said: "what Do You Give Us In Return? Now That You've Taken Everything From Us? What Meaning Is Left, If Everything That I've Been Taught Since I Was A Child Turns Out To Be Untrue?" Carl Looked At Him And Said, Do Something Meaningful.

It Is A Great Tragedy That Science, This Wonderful Process For Finding Out What Is True, Has Ceded The Spiritual Uplift Of Its Central Revelations: The Vastness Of The Universe, The Immensity Of Time, The Relatedness Of All Life, And Life's Preciousness On Our Tiny Planet.