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.
Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
If you look at all the serious scientists in the world, there is no big disagreement on the basics of this...it would be absolute lunacy to act as if climate change is not occurring.
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.
A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.
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