As soon as it is held that any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spr… - Bertrand Russell

Apart from the question of food, there is the question of energy. It seems clear that, if it were financially worth while, fairly economical methods could be discovered by which more use would be made than at present of energy from the sun. And in theory there is no calculable limit to what can be got out of atomic energy. When people have discovered how to turn hydrogen into helium, sea-water will become their raw material, and it will be a long time before this source of supply is exhausted. Speaking of less specific possibilities, we have to reflect that man has existed for about a million years, and scientific technique for at most two hundred years. Seeing what it has already accomplished, it would be very rash to place any limits upon what it may accomplish in the future. Scientific knowledge is an intoxicating draught, and it may be one which the human race is unable to sustain. It may be that, like the men who built the Tower of Babel in the hope of reaching up to heaven, so the men who pursue the secrets of the atom will be punished for their impiety by providing by accident the means of exterminating the human species, and perhaps all life on this planet. From some points of view such a consummation might not be wholly regrettable, but these points of view can hardly be ours. Perhaps somewhere else, in some distant nebula, some unimportant star has an unimportant planet on which there are rational beings. Perhaps in another million years their instruments will tell them of our fate, and lead them to agree on an agenda for a conference of foreign ministers. If so, man will not have lived in vain.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.