Don't Neglect Your Future You
There is one person whose wants and needs you routinely ignore, opting instead to tend to your own immediate desires, and that person is future you. When it comes to making decisions that will have some effect on your long-term health or happiness — for example, whether or not to go to the gym today, in keeping with your New Year’s resolution — current you is always finding a new way to steal from future you. It’s time the two yous got better acquainted.
This concept in itself may n...
notes Common Sense Does Not Predict
Common sense ... has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful science is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately, they seldom are prospectively. Common sense provides a kind of ultimate validation after science has completed its work; it seldom anticipates what science is going to discover. notesScience predicts, common sense comes along afterwards.
problem is not technology but your lack of will to adapt
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970416/quotesProf.Barnhardt: There must be alternatives. You must have some technology that could solve our problem.
Klaatu: Your problem is not technology. The problem is you. You lack the will to change.
Prof. Barnhardt: Then help us change.
Klaatu: I cannot change your nature. You treat the world as you treat each other.
Prof.Barnhardt: But every civilization reaches a crisis point eventually.
Klaatu: Most of them don't make it.
Prof. Barnhardt: Yours did. How?
Klaatu: Our sun was dying. We had to evolve in order to survive.
Prof.Barnhardt: So it was only when your world was threated with destruction that you became what you are now.
Klaatu: Yes.
Prof.Barnhardt: Well that's where we are. You say we're on the brink of destruction and you're right. But it's only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve. This is our moment. Don't take it from us, we are close to an answer.
Benjamin Franklin on Future of Science
The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter...Agriculture may diminish its Labour and double its Produce; all Diseases may, by sure means, be prevented or cured, not even excepting that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improv...
2 An optimistic vision of the future of man and a lament that he won't be able to see it.
Our Improvement Through Education is Limitless
It has never yet been supposed, that all the facts of nature, and all the means of acquiring precision in the computation and analysis of those facts, and all the connections of objects with each other, and all the possible combinations of ideas, can be exhausted by the human mind. The mere relations of magnitude, the combinations, quantity and extent of this idea alone, form already a system too immense for the mind of man ever to grasp the whole of it; a portion, more vast than that which h...A vision of the future. Although we may never change physically or in our mental capacity, our innovations and amassing of knowledge will provide us with limitless potential for intellectual growth.
Wonder at the Age of the Earth
The great age of the earth will appear greater to man when he understands the origin of living organisms and the reasons for the gradual development and improvement of their organization. This antiquity will appear even greater when he realizes the length of time and the particular conditions which were necessary to bring all the living species into existence. This is particularly true since man is the latest result and present climax of this development, the ultimate limit of which, if it is... notesLamarck believes we will marvel at the time it took us to get here, and wonder at the future apex we might reach.
Faraday Predicts the Electric Nature of the Atom
Although we know nothing of what an atom is, yet we cannot resist forming some idea of a small particle, which represents it to the mind ... there is an immensity of facts which justify us in believing that the atoms of matter are in some way endowed or associated with electrical powers, to which they owe their most striking qualities, and amongst them their mutual chemical affinity. notesSummarizing his investigations in electrolysis.
Call for Nitrogen Fixation
England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty... The fixation of atmo... notesCrookes predicts the failure of farming to support a growing population and calls on chemists to work on improving production.
Science is Phrophetic
All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy. notesIt predicts the future.
Predictions of the Future are "Laughably Conservative"
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run—and often in the short one—the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative. notesNot always true, but a nice sentiment.
