Carolina QuotesBut somewhat like people who object to spending money needed in the ghettoes on exploring the moon, I think the best hope for our survival is to be based on understanding human predicaments here on earth, not expecting a saving message from super-human beings in the sky...Thinking about and even hoping to find extraterrestrial civilizations, however, sharpen our search for and appreciation of the peculiar virtues and vices of the only form of life we know.
Lewis White Beck Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Lewis White Beck, "Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life" in Extraterrestrials Science and Alien Intelligence ( Regis Jr., Edward. Ed., 1985), Part V, p. 14
- year
- 1985
- locator
- p. 14
Cite this record
“But somewhat like people who object to spending money needed…” Lewis White Beck. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-212DA0EDE5. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/212da0ede5
More from Lewis White Beck
It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions.
Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition. I believe even responsible scientific speculation and expensive technology of space exploration in search for other life are the peculiarly modern equivalent of angeology and Utopia or of demonology and apocalypse.
The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth.