Many Americans make the mistake of assuming that space research has no values here on earth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as the wartime development of radar gave us the transistor, and all that it made possible, so research in space medicine holds the promise of substantial benefit for those of us who are earthbound. For our effort in space is not as some have suggested, a competitor for the natural resources that we need to develop the earth. It is a working partner and a coproducer of these resources. And nothing makes this clearer than the fact that medicine in space is going to make our lives healthier and happier here on earth.
John F. KennedyRelated topics
benefit clearer competitor development earth effort happy lives medicine mistake natural need nothing possible promise research space substantial truth working radar transistorRelated quotes
Balla [his former art teacher in Italy] flabbergasted us because, not content with being involved in a Futurist campaign, as you can well imagine him doing, he launched himself into a complete transformation. He rejected all his works and all his working methods. He started work on four pictures of movement (one painting was his 'Girl running on a balcony'), which were still realist but incredible ahead of their time.... He confided this to w:Aldo Pallazzeschi: 'They (Balla's former - so much younger pupils Boccioni and Severini] did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress.
Umberto Boccioni
The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
Stephen Hawking
This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike.
Isaiah Berlin
I think one of the interesting things about the Linux phenomenon is that [Linus] has been able to keep some kind of control over such an amazingly extended development environment. I'm certainly glad that I didn't have to develop C in public, because you get more suggestions than you really want. Being in this nice, small group, you can control that sort of thing. I honestly don't know the dynamics and the details of the Linux kernel project. However, one of the knocks on Linux is that it is undisciplined. But I think probably the fairer observation is that it is amazingly disciplined, compared to what you would expect, given the nature of the endeavor.
Dennis Ritchie
Some students of philosophy have unreasonably high expectations of the subject. They expect it to provide them with a complete and detailed picture of the human predicament. They think that philosophy will reveal to them the meaning of life, and explain to them every facet of our complex existences. Now, although studying philosophy can illuminate fundamental questions about our lives, it does not provide anything like a complete picture, if indeed there could be such a thing. Studying philosophy isn't an alternative to studying art, literature, history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, politics, and science.
Nigel Warburton