One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.
Interpretation
The idea that UFOs are spaceships from other planets is no longer credible.
In this quote, Arthur C. Clarke suggests that the theory of UFOs originating from distant planets lacks serious consideration among scientists. This reflects a broader skepticism towards claims that lack empirical evidence and urges a critical approach to understanding phenomena that captivate the imagination.
In practice
In a science class discussing the scientific method, this quote can highlight the importance of evidence in forming theories.
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'.
The space station is the most unique laboratory we've ever built. The reason we have it is to do research on materials, people, medical matters, pharmaceuticals - the possibilities are nearly endless.
Iβve spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials, these for organisms are air water & soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in the sun and any hot body in the form of heat, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.
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