The Lord works in mysterious ways. Mrs. Lansbury had always said that. Everything happens for a purpose. Such bull. Such unmitigated crap. I felt my … - Robert J. Sawyer

There may be oodles of possible humans, but it is a finite number.

“What arrogant fools we are!” said Jag. “Don’t you see?” To this day, despite all the humbling lessons the universe has already taught us, we still try to retain a central role in creation. We devise theories of cosmology that say the universe was destined to give rise to us, that it had to evolve life like us. Humans call it the anthropic principle, my people called it the aj-Waldahudigralt principle, but it’s all the same thing: the desperate, deep-rooted need to believe that we are significant, that we’re important.

It turned out that big-bucks science had been a purely mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, starting with the Manhattan Project and ending with the fall of the Soviet Union.