Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan ✨ Carl Sagan (2011). Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, p.104, Ballantine Books
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- If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze. ✨ Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan … ▶
- The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people … ▶
- The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
- I believe that even a smattering of such findings in modern science and mathematics is far more compelling and exciting than most of the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned … ▶
- Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone. ✨ Carl Sagan (2011). … ▶
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