(Well, he wasn’t exactly William F. Buckley, but he did bear the name of a contentious and well-known TV interviewer, - Carl Sagan

وتكمن الأهمية الإنسانية للخيال العلمي في أنها قد تتحول إلى تجربة عن المستقبل وكاستكشاف لمستقبل بديل وكمحاولات لتقليل حجم الصدمة في المستقبل. وتلك هي بعض أسباب الجاذبية الكبيرة التي يتمتع بها الخيال العلمي بين الشباب، فهم الذين سيعيشون في المستقبل.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights. There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.

If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which skepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate.