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.
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.
But science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.
'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Having walked on the Moon, I know something about what we need to explore, really explore, in space.
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