العلم أكثر تعقيدا وبراعة، ويكشف عن كون أكثر ثراء، ويستثير بقوة شعورنا بالعجب والاندهاش. كما أن له فضيلة إضافية وهامة، وهي عمق المعاني التي تحملها الك… - Carl Sagan

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us… The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life…Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand… There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. — CARL SAGAN, reflecting on a photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of 6 billion kilometers (Pale Blue Dot, 1994)

The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community — as well as the sort broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy.

It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would