Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a satellite yet so prodigiously diverse that only a tiny fraction of species have been discovered and named.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the incredible diversity of life on Earth and the fragile nature of our biosphere.
E. O. Wilson emphasizes the delicate and thin boundary of the biosphere that supports all life on Earth. This boundary, although nearly invisible from satellite imagery, houses an immense variety of species, most of which remain undiscovered, underscoring the importance of biodiversity and the need for conservation efforts.
In practice
In a speech on environmental awareness, I can quote Wilson to emphasize the fragility and richness of our planet's life.
Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
The worst thing that will probably happen-in fact is already well underway-is not energy depletion, economic collapse, conventional war, or the expansion of totalitarian governments. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired in a few generations. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.
Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.
We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.
Many different planets are many different distances from their host star; we find ourselves at this distance because if we were closer or farther away, the temperature would be hotter or colder, eliminating liquid water, an essential ingredient for our survival.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.