The hope that if they had intervened many times in human history, surely in the present time, a time of great… — Carl Sagan
The hope that if they had intervened many times in human history, surely in the present time, a time of great crisis recognized in the 1960s and '70s and manifestly clear today in the age of fifty-five thousand nuclear weapons, that the extraterrestrials would come and prevent us from doing the worst to ourselves. And in that sense I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? ...So let's call it "theophorin"...What could the selective advantage of theophorin be? ...to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey.
There is a very stunning range of studies... of interstellar organic matter... the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. ...complex organic materials are everywhere.
Now, it is sometimes said that people who take a skeptical approach to UFOs or ancient astronauts or indeed some varieties of revealed religion are engaging in prejudice. I maintain that this is not prejudice. It is postjudice. That is, not a judgement made before examining the evidence but a judgement made after examining the evidence.
