Technology is Preserving Our Ghosts

Our technology is giving us progressively greater power to keep alive our ancestors' ghosts. First the invention of writing allowed us to preserve their words. Painting and photography allowed us to preserve their faces. The phonograph preserves their voices and the videotape recorder preserves their movement and gestures. But this is only the beginning. Soon we shall acquire the technology to preserve a permanent record of the sequence of bases in the DNA of their cells. This means that we s...

 A Star for Everyone Who Ever Lived

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and...

 God of the Gaps

The man in the street will, therefore, twist the statement that the scientist has come to the end of meaning into the statement that the scientist has penetrated as far as he can with the tools at his command, and that there is something beyond the ken of the scientist. This imagined beyond, which the scientist has proved he cannot penetrate, will become the playground of the imagination of every mystic and dreamer. The existence of such a domain will be made the basis of an orgy of rationali...