The Seemingly Insuperable Difficulties Of Deep-space Travel

We Are Inescapably The Result Of A Long Heritage Of Learning, Adaptation, Mutation And Evolution, The Product Of A History Which Predates Our Birth As A Biological Species And Stretches Back Over Many Thousand Millennia... Going Further Back, We Share A Common Ancestry With Our Fellow Primates; And Going Still Further Back, We Share A Common Ancestry With All Other Living Creatures And Plants Down To The Simplest Microbe. The Further Back We Go, The Greater The Difference From External Appearances And Behavior Patterns Which We Observe Today.

The Chance That Higher Life Forms Might Have Emerged Through Evolutionary Processes Is Comparable With The Chance That A Tornado Sweeping Through A Junk Yard Might Assemble A Boeing 747 From The Material Therein.

Outstanding Examples Of Genius - A Mozart, A Shakespeare, Or A Carl Friedrich Gauss - Are Markers On The Path Along Which Our Species Appears Destined To Tread.

On Scientific Grounds This Big Bang Assumption Is Much Less The Palatable Of The Two. For It Is An Irrational Process That Cannot Be Described In Scientific Terms. . . . On Philosophical Grounds Too I Cannot See Any Good Reason For Preferring The Big Bang Idea. Indeed It Seems To Me In The Philosophical Sense To Be A Distinctly Unsatisfactory Notion, Since It Puts The Basic Assumption Out Of Sight Where It Can Never Be Challenged By A Direct Appeal To Observation.

Religion Is But A Desperate Attempt To Find An Escape From The Truly Dreadful Situation In Which We Find Ourselves. Here We Are In This Wholly Fantastic Universe With Scarcely A Clue As To Whether Our Existence Has Any Real Significance. No Wonder Then That Many People Feel The Need For Some Belief That Gives Them A Sense Of Security, And No Wonder That They Become Very Angry With People Like Me Who Say That This Is Illusory.