The lives that would eventually exist here, when these arid rocks hatched their grasses and forests and the sky lowered its lakes and oceans, would also be invented. Everything around her was a fabrication, carpentered from energy.
But what was energy? Even the best scientists […] really could not say. Maybe Lod was right, after all. Maybe he was truly alive, living as all energy lives, cumbered by mystery.
The Big Bang is our modern, scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Because I think this is perfect and relevant and sums up exactly how I feel about ‘higher power’ and the way that these sentiments enrich my own ideas about human relationships.
Barack Obama: I am told that the last three speakers here have been the Pope, Her Majesty the Queen and Nelson Mandela; which is either a very high bar, or the beginning of a very funny joke.
America this one is a keeper okay
The video: http://youtu.be/5uVeisIyypA
(Source: flushedwithcash)
The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently, we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos(Source: atomstargazer)
Via sagan|sense
De-Extinction - Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life
Within the next several years, we will have the ability to bring extinct animals like the wooly mammoth or the passenger pigeon or the European auroch back to life. Unlike the silly fiction of Jurassic Park and its “dino DNA!!!” in a fossilized mosquito, we have uncovered nearly intact mammoth remains in Siberian permafrost. We have their genome … we can rebuild them.
But should we? Is this a world that a mammoth, or countless other extinct species targeted for de-extinction, belongs in? Who decides what belongs where, or rather when? Should we direct these efforts toward saving today’s endangered species instead?
There’s a lot of questions to answer. Luckily National Geographic has put together an entire issue and online collection on the subject, digging into the technology, the pros and the cons, and the very human motivations behind even asking these questions. It’s highly recommended reading.
What do you think?
Colosso dell’Appennino, 1580
sculptor: Giambologna (1529-1608)
Villa Demidoff Park, Tuscany, Italy
About me
to have lived in vain.
For such creatures small as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
- Carl Sagan -
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
- George Orwell -
We know who speaks for the nations; but who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for earth?
- Carl Sagan -
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