03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus

 Spaceship Earth Didn't Come with Instructions

One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile. If you own an automobile, you realize that you must put oil and gas into it, and you must put water in the radiator and take care of the car as a whole. You begin to develop quite a little thermodynamic sense. You know that you're either going to have to keep the machine in good order or it's going to be in trouble and fail to function. We have not been seeing our Spaceship Ea...
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It requires maintenance in order to continue supporting our growing civilization, but we have to discover, through empiricism and experimentation, what that maintenance is.

03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus

 The Parameters of "Spaceship Earth"

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest star — our energy-supplying mother-ship, the Sun — is ninety-two million miles away, and the nearest star is one hundred thousand times further away. It takes approximately four and one third years for light to get to us from the next nearest energy supply ship star. That is the kind of space-distanced pattern we are flying. Our little Spa...
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Our place in the cosmos. This is the situation in which we find ourselves.

17 MAY 2012 by ideonexus

 The Third Blow to Man's Ego

In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness... the second blow fell when biological research destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature… But human megalomania will have s...
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Not the center of the Universe, not above the animals, and now not even in control of his own mind.