Many, and some of the most pressing, of our terrestrial problems can be solved only by going into space. Long before it was a vanishing commodity, the wilderness as the preservation of the world was proclaimed by Thoreau. In the new wilderness of the Solar System may lie the future preservation of mankind.
Interpretation
Exploring space may hold solutions to critical Earthly issues, suggesting our future relies on space exploration.
Arthur C. Clarke emphasizes the importance of space exploration in addressing some of humanity's most urgent challenges. He connects the idea of preserving Earth's wilderness, as noted by Thoreau, to the potential of the Solar System to serve as a new frontier for human survival and sustainability.
In practice
During a keynote speech on environmental sustainability, this quote can illustrate the need for innovative solutions beyond Earth.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.
I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa.
It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.
Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.
In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.
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