Name: Carl Sagan Speaks Zeitgeist (Original)
Uploaded: 2018-11-29T08:09:42.000Z
Duration: 17 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration

is the image of the earth, finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable

bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

Here we are on a planet which is about five thousand million years old,

the sun around which it goes is not much older

it is part of a galaxy which is perhaps ten or twelve thousand million years old

which is one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of millions of other galaxies...

Humans have been on this planet for something like a million years

and for the vast bulk of that time things changed extremely slowly.

our technology increased and improved by very slow steps

and just recently we had a huge increase.

it's flat for a long time and then... boom!

increase in technology, increase in pollution

increase in our powers to disturb the environment

but we're the same old human beings as we were a thousand years ago

that there's a new situation, and we have to adapt to it.

On the other hand, that's one thing we humans are good at...

We're smart. That's our principal advantage over all the other species

I mean we're not faster, stronger, better diggers,

What we do is figure out and build because of our hands.

we're children equally of the earth and the sky

in our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage...

submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders

all of which puts our survival in some doubt.

But we've also acquired compassion for others,

a desire to learn from history and experience

and a great soaring passionate intelligence.

The clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.

Our ability, to understand things instantly

derives from a certain range of size and speed and duration

that are appropriate for human existence.

We know about things from a tenth of a millimetre

from a fraction of a second to a lifetime

So when we are dealing with matters of quantum physics

where particles are the size of 10^-13th centimetres

or in cosmology where we are talking about

Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labelled impractical or contrary to human nature,

but fundamental changes can clearly be made

in the last two centuries abject slavery,

which was with us for thousands of years,

Women, systematically mistreated for millennia

are gradually gaining the political and economic power

and some wars of aggression have recently been stopped

felt by the people in the aggressor nations.

If a five or six year old asks why the moon is round or why grass is green

the usual adult answer, at least in my experience

say 'what shape did you expect the moon to be, square?'

or 'what colour did you expect the grass to be, blue?'

instead of saying that 'those are interesting questions, lets try to find out the answer'

and when you grow up you'll be able to discover the answer.

It would be very healthy for the human species if there were

It's not that pseudo-science and superstition

and new age so-called beliefs and fundamentalist zealotary are something new

they've been with us for as long as we've been human

but we live in an age based on science and technology

science and technology are propelling us forward at accelerating rates

that's right and if we don't understand it

if it's something that 'Ohh I'm not good at that, I don't know anything about it'

then who's making all the decisions about science and technology

that are going to determine what kind of future our children live in

but there's no more than a handful of members with any background in science at all

and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power

sooner or later is going to going to blow up in our faces.

I mean who's running the science and technology in a democracy

Science is more than body of knowledge it's a way of thinking

a way of sceptically interrogating the Universe

with a fine understanding of human fallibility

if we are not able to ask sceptical questions

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Carl Sagan Speaks Zeitgeist (Original)

perspective

extremely

vast

fragile