The energy requirements for interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades. If they want to make contact, they would make contact; if not, they would save their energy and go elsewhere.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that if extraterrestrial beings exist, their reasons for traveling through space would be more significant than simply trivial engagement with humanity.
Isaac Asimov's quote reflects on the immense energy required for interstellar travel and posits that any advanced civilization capable of such feats would likely have serious purposes for their journeys. The idea that they would only engage with humans for entertainment or trivial matters seems implausible; rather, if they were truly interested in communication, they would readily make contact, or alternatively, they would conserve their energy for pursuits that matter to them elsewhere in the universe.
In practice
This quote can be used in a TED talk about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life and their implications on human existence.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
I am not very sceptical, — a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science. A good deal of scepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met with not a few men, who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or observations, which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable .
Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.
It was the late Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar who, by founding the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, made it possible for the scientific aspirations of my early years to continue burning brightly.
I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
Most man only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.
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