We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.
Edgar MitchellRead
We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need for humanity to recognize our place in a larger cosmic community.
Edgar Mitchell's quote highlights the crucial moment in human history where we must acknowledge our connection to other inhabited planets. It suggests that just as a community must recognize its neighbors, humanity must expand its perspective beyond Earth and accept that we are part of a broader universe filled with potential life, fostering a sense of unity and responsibility towards this expanded community.
In practice
Using this quote during a panel discussion on space exploration and humanity's future.
We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.
We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.
We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it's creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us.
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty.
My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.
I experienced an ecstasy of unity. I not only saw the connectedness, I felt it and experienced it sentiently. The restraints and boundaries of flesh and bone fell away.
We can't any longer have the conventional understanding of genetics which everybody peddles because it is increasingly obvious that epigenetics - actually things which influence the genome's function - are much more important than we realised.
Cancer is not one disease but many diseases.
Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.
Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.
Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.
The last thing that man will understand in nature is the performance of his brain.
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