I often am asked, ''Do you believe in UFOs?'' I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and no… - Carl Sagan

Some 3.6 million years ago, in what is now northern Tanzania, a volcano erupted, the resulting cloud of ash covering the surrounding savannahs. In 1979, the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found in that ash footprints - the footprints, she believes, of an early hominid, perhaps an ancestor of all the people on the Earth today. And 380,000 kilometers away, in a flat dry plain that humans have in a moment of optimism called the Sea of Tranquility, there is another footprint, left by the first human to walk another world. We have come far in 3.6 million years, and in 4.6 billion and in 15 billion.

For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action.

«زعم وانج هونجشينج أحد هواة الكيمياء، أنه قام بتخليق سائل إذا ما أضيفت مقادير قليلة منه إلى الماء، تحول إلى جازولين أو ما يعادله. وظل لفترة، يتلقى التمويل من الجيش والشرطة السرية، ولكن حين اتضح أن اختراعه محض خداع، أُلقي القبض عليه وأودع السجن»