Carolina QuotesThe 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.
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
“The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, tec…” Lewis White Beck. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-9A154A4541. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/9a154a4541
More from Lewis White Beck
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.
But 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.
It is an amusing jew d’esprit to take a philosopher’s ten or twenty volumes and try to compress them to postcard length. My proposal for doing this to Kant’s will be disappointing, since hardly anyone nowadays will deny the sentence but many will deny that it is the seminal thought in Kant. But it was a highly disputable proposition in his day, and I think that some of the lasting importance of Kant is shown by the fact that it is no longer disputed. The sentence would be: In order to know and to act, it is necessary both to see and to think.