That's one of the ironies of our time: Right when we're on the edge of serious improvements in health care, we're also cooking the planet.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the paradox of advancing health care while simultaneously harming the environment.
Kim Stanley Robinson reflects on the ironic situation of modern society where significant strides in health care and medical advancements are being made at a time when human activities are severely damaging the planet. This juxtaposition raises important ethical and environmental concerns about sustainability and the impact of progress on future generations.
In practice
In a discussion about the future of medicine at a conference, this quote could be used to emphasize the need for environmentally friendly health practices.
Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.
If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the U.S., realize they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value.
The challenge of global warming should stimulate a whole raft of manifestly benign innovations - for conserving energy and generating it by 'clean' means (biofuels, innovative renewables, carbon sequestration, and nuclear fusion).
I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an "elegant" or "robust" theory. But it isn't science.
I think the next century will be the century of complexity.
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