They’re engineers,” she said. She was thinking, What did he expect? He must have dealt with engineers at GM. “Emotionally, they’re all thirteen years… - Michael Crichton

In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.

And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don't like to be reminded of how frail we are — how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended.

Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting — about half a billion dollars in the last few decades — is money wasted. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way. We’ve tried the impossible — and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable.