This link has been bookmarked by 11 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 Apr 2007, by Djiezes Kraaijst.
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01 Jul 16
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Well why was this do you suppose? I'll tell you. The story was not printed because of any of the engineering details...you should excuse the expression. It was published because I had something in it that the editor had never seen before. I had postulated resistance to space flight. There was a whole organization of people on earth who were sore as anything at the people who were trying to get out into space. They thought people should stay on earth and mind their own business. And this had never been postulated before. Never!
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It never occurred to anybody that there might actually be resistance to the whole notion; people might think it was a rotten idea and a waste of money.
After I wrote the story, again, nobody had the idea. I don't think another story ever appeared in which there was any hint of opposition to space flight. I mean, on principle. Until such time as the opposition did develop.
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"The Social Resistance to Technological Change"
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Well, when I read all of these references I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance...and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance...to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.
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For instance, when the stagecoaches came into England, the canal owners objected. Not that they would lose money, although they would, but they feared for humanity. Because as the stagecoaches tore along at fifteen miles an hour, the air whipping past the nostrils of the people on board, would by Bernoulli's Principle, suck all the air out of the lungs.
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Well naturally the stagecoach people laughed heartily, and all they had to do was run a stagecoach at fifteen miles an hour with people inside and show them there's no harm. But they memorized the argument...for when the railroads came in.
[group laughs mildly]
Well then, reading all this, and this was over a period of months...I read it, and read it...I said to myself: "Hey, you know I can make a syllogism out of this" because I had taken up liberal arts and the humanities, and they taught me about syllogisms.
I don't know if you guys know about syllogisms. It's... The units of a syllogism is one Aristotle.
[group laughs]
Well, see, that's...to put it in engineering terms: One Aristotle per second is a fast syllogism.
[group laughs mildly]
It goes this way: Major premise: All technological changes meet resistance. Minor Premise: Space travel represents a technological change. Conclusion:
[group laughs]
This is the tricky one!
[group laughs]
There will be resistance to space travel.
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. In it, did the hero wish to see what the world of the future would be like, and he was not in the kind of science-fiction story where he would have a time machine, so he had to do something else. What he did was to invent a potion, which when he drank it, put him to sleep for five thousand years, and then woke him up a little hoarse, but otherwise OK.
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The Man Who Awoke" by Lawrence Manning
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And he stayed there five thousand years, and then woke up unharmed. Oh, give or take a few months; I mean, you know, you can't be too exact on a thing like this. And he somehow thought that he was going to come out and see a very futuristic world with all kinds of extremely super-modernistic devices flying through the air, and magical food pills and all that. And instead, what did he find? He found a very constricted world. A world in which everybody lived rather...rather not very lavish lives. You know, they dressed in homespun, and they walked everywhere, and they worried a lot about what the next meal would be. And so he said to them "What is this?" he says. "You guys are leading such a constricted lives. What's all this futurism I expected?" So they said "Oh well, you don't understand." He said: "We're short on energy. Very short on energy because some thousands of years ago there was a generation or two of human beings who burnt up all the coal and oil on Earth, and left nothing for us." And our hero said "Strange you should say that". He said "I happen to be from the very generation that did this for you!"
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Major premise: The Earth's volume is finite Minor Premise: The total volume of coal and oil on the Earth is less than the total volume of the Earth Conclusion: The volume of coal and oil are finite.
You would think that this was so obvious! Now, let's start and make this conclusion the major premise of the next syllogism:
Major Premise: The volume of coal and oil are finite Minor Premise: We are burning some every day Conclusion: We will use it all up eventually
Well, I got that in 1933. And so you see how science fiction helps you escape. It helps you escape to the kinds of problems that'll keep you worried for forty years.
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There are always people who think that all we have to do, after all is abandoned, all this foolish technology that we've made ourselves slave to, and go back like our ancestors and live close to the soil with the good things of nature. That would be great if we could do it. If we could go back to the way it was before World War II, technologically, we could support all the people that lived on Earth before World War II. The catch is that in these last thirty years one billion and a half people have been added to the population of the Earth. And we have been feeding them largely because of all these things that we have done in these last thirty years, the good weather, the fertilizers, and the pesticides, and the irrigation, and the green revolution, and all the rest of it. If we abandon that, we also have to abandon a billion and a half people; and there are going to be very few volunteers for the job.
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We are in a situation where we cannot go back. We cannot abandon technology. We can't say "Well, heck! We'll go back to the good old fireplace with wooden logs! We don't need this damned central heating!" There's two things about the fireplace with those good old natural wooden logs. In the first place, it's a rotten system for heating the house, which is why everyone switched to first the coal furnace, and then the oil furnace. They didn't do that because they hated nature. They didn't do that because they turned their backs on things that were nice, and just wanted filthy modern stuff, no.
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Well then, what are we going to do in the future? Population is still going up. Population right now is higher than it's ever been in the world's history; it stands at just under four billion. And the increase, the rate of increase is higher that it's ever been in world history; two percent a year. Never been anywhere near that high. Right now, the world's population is going up by two hundred thousand hungry mouths every day. By the year 2000, barring catastrophe, the Earth's population is going to be seven billion. Nobody thinks the Earth's food supply is going to nearly double by the year 2000. It may be that our food supply won't go up much at all. There's going to be terrific amounts of famine. What can we do about it?
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Well, throughout the history of life on Earth, there have been periods where a given species has, for one reason or another, spurted it's numbers upward temporarily. There's been a surprisingly good supply of food, the weather has been just right, somehow there have been no predators...something has happened, and the numbers went up. They always went down again, and always the same way; by an increase in the death rate. The large numbers of the species starved when the food ran short. They fell victim to some disease, when as a result of being on short rations they were weaker. They made good marks for predators. It always went down. And the same thing will happen to mankind, we don't have to worry. The death rate will go up, and we will die off through violence, through disease, through famine.
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The only thing is, must we have our numbers controlled in the same way that all other species have them controlled? We have something others don't; we have brains. We can foresee. We can plan. We can see solutions that are humane. And there is a solution that is humane, and that is to lower the birth rate.
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No species in the history of the Earth has ever voluntarily lowered it's birth rate in order to control it's population, because they didn't know what birth rate was, how to control it, that there was a population problem. We're the only species in the history of the Earth.
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here is no need to decide whether to stop the population increase or not. There is no need to decide whether the population will be lowered or not. It will, it will!
The only thing mankind has to decide is whether to let it be done in the old inhumane method that nature has always used, or to invent a new humane method of our own. That is the only choice that faces us; whether to lower the population catastrophically by a raised death rate, or to lower it humanely by a lowered birth rate. And we all make the choice. And I have a suspicion that we won't make the right choice, which is the tragedy of humanity right now.
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will be expected to have no more than two children. If she has only one child, good. And if she has no children, fine.
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Do you know that through all of the disasters in history, that only one disaster as far as we know has ever actually lowered the world's population? The Black Death in the 1300's. Which may have killed off one third of all humanity. Lowered the world population, and took it a century to make it up.
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Those were the days when death rates were very high; of course it would take a century to make it up. Nowadays we can make it up in maybe twenty years.
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And since then, the disasters that have come: World War I, World War II, the Influenza pandemic of 1918...haven't even made a wiggle in the rise of human population.
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So we have great powers of increasing like rabbits. We needn't worry if we allow the population to drop. God, how easily we could reverse that if we had to.
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Seriously! When the germ theory finally came in and people learned how to arrange it so that women could have babies in reasonable safety, the world discovered to their surprise that women had a longer life expectancy than men. This had never been understood before, because throughout history women had, on the average, lived years and years less than men had. With all the dangers men faced, the hard work in the fields, the hunting accidents, the killings in war, everything else, women died faster for one reason and one reason only: childbirth. Every woman had one baby after another until one of them killed her. Usually, it didn't take long.
Well then, why do women do this? Because they are carefully told that being a wife and mother is the most glorious thing in the world, the one thing they're fit for, the most noble activity they can possibly have, and...and this is told to them until they believe it. And if they don't believe it, there's a lot of trouble made for them.
Well, I won't go into the whole thing. I suspect that you women know all about this already, and you men would rather not listen.
[group laughs mildly]
But notice the difference: once you want women not to have children, you're going to have to give them something else to do! It is absolutely impossible to tell a woman that she can't have children, and at the same time that she can't do anything else either except maybe wash an occasional dish.
[mild laugh from a few of the women in the group]
Because if you tell a woman that, she'll figure out some way to have a baby.
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Well then, in the world of the 21st century in order to keep the birth rate down, we're going to have to give women interesting things to do that'll make them glad to stay out of the nursery. And the interesting things that I can think of that we give women to do are essentially the same as the interesting things that we give men to do. I mean we're going to have women help in running the government, and science, and industry...whatever there is to run in the 21st century. And what it amounts to is we're going to have to pretend...when I say "we", I mean men...we're going to have to pretend that women are people.
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You have to understand that throughout history, mankind has lived in a world of youth. You know, we talk about the youth-centeredness of our culture. There's nothing else it can be. Throughout history, the life expectancy has been somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, depending upon the time and the place. Very few people have lived into middle-age and beyond. Very few. We've had a world of young, even today in those lands where the birth rate is higher...considerably higher...than the death rate. You have places where half the people are younger than fifteen.
Well naturally, where most of the people are young, you concentrate on the young! When there are very few old people, you don't worry about them very much. They come in handy in their small numbers. The old men were the repositories of tradition. In the days before we had written records...let alone electronic records and computers...the only people who remembered the way it used to be a long time ago...forty years ago...were old men with gray beards! So you respected them!! They represented wisdom!! And you let them rule the state and the church. The word "priest" comes from the Greek word for old, and the word senator comes from the Latin word for old...as you can tell by the relationship to senna which also comes.
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A woman, however, had a bare face so that you could see the wrinkles! Which ordinary people hardly ever saw because there were hardly ever any old people to have wrinkles. Not only that, people generally lost their teeth by the time they were forty because there was no such thing as dentistry. So that, the old women had gums that came together, and it brought the chin and the nose close together, which looked funny. In fact, if you will look at the caricature of "the Witch" as we see it now on Halloween. It's just an old woman without teeth, and with a wrinkled face. And I think a great many of the fears of witches really represented the fears of the strange appearance of old women...which of course nowadays we don't have because old women look young.
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But what do you do in a society in which the number of old people increases? You have a lot of old people just when you don't need them anymore. We don't need them as repositories of tradition anymore. We've got everything in writing, and in documents. And we're getting more, and more, and more old people all the time. The life expectancy now is seventy now in the United States; people never die for goodness sakes! I mean, it's one of the reasons why there's a generation gap; all the old people hang on to the jobs until they're forcibly retired. And then they must be forcibly retired. And there's nothing else you can think of doing for them so you give them a watch, and a pat on the back, and a ticket to a park bench.
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We know what we think of old people. They're sort of drags. They're sort of dead-heads. They don't have bright thoughts the way young people do. They're not creative. They're not ingenious. They're not daring. They're sort of stick-in-the-mud. Conservative. Stodgy. I mean, they ain't with it.
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School is the price of being young and helpless! Not going to school is the reward of being grown-up, and strong, and powerful. You associate school with weakness and childishness. You associate non-school with strength and adulthood. Every kid knows that he is going to be rewarded for reaching the age of sixteen, or whatever age he's allowed to get out, he's going to be rewarded by never having to go to school again, never having to open up another book, never having to learn another fact, never having to think another thought. We teach kids that to be grown up is to be able to be stupid for the rest of your life.
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It's called arguing in a circle.
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You know, we can talk sometimes about managing our own evolution. About cloning people. About deciding how with genetic engineering we're going to improve ourselves. But how do we improve ourselves? We don't know. We've improved domestic animals a great way. We've got cows that give milk by the hundreds of gallons. We've got sheep that are wool...all the way through.
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We've got turkeys that are all breast.
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I was asked a few days ago...really was, I'm not making this up...whether I didn't think an intellectual elite ought to run the world. And I said, by an intellectual elite, you mean people like me? Because I didn't know what he meant by an intellectual elite. I thought maybe it might mean people like him, in which case no!
[group laughs]
And he said: "Yes, people like you". And I said no, that would be no good because I'm only smart in certain ways, and very stupid in other ways. And if everybody was like me, and we were running the world, we'd all be smart in the same way, and all be stupid in the same way, and it's the stupidness that's going to kill us. I said, what we need are people of all kinds running the world! Some of whom are smart in one way, and some of whom are smart in the other way, and with everyone's smartness in different directions, so that they can sort of cancel out; so that everybody's stupidity can be caught by someone else's smartness in the same direction.
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In the same way, that's what we want. The greatest...the greatest gift that mankind has is it's vast gene pool. All the different genes it has. All the different characteristics; the smart and the stupid, the strong and the weak. Because it's the variety that makes it possible for us to meet different emergencies, and what is weak under one set of conditions might be strong under another, what is stupid at one time is smart at another, and so on. We can't throw out anything for fear that that's exactly what we'll need someday.
The way I like to put it is, naturally we all think it's much better to be a brilliant nuclear physicist, than to just be a plumber. But, who would you rather live next door to, brilliant nuclear physicist or a plumber? And unless you're married to one, think: how often would you wake up in the middle of the night badly needing a nuclear physicist?
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Well then, I'm coming now to the end of the 21st century. We've got a world without sexism, ageism, racism. We're not going to have a world without war, but that's nothing unusual. We've got a world without war now.
[mild chuckle from group]
You don't think we have? Think about it. What kind of wars can we afford to fight? Two kinds. We can afford to fight a little war where you send bombs in envelopes, or stick some sticks of dynamite in an automobile in a busy place. There's no way of stopping that, and these days explosives are cheap. But what are you gonna win with a war like that? You can keep it up for a thousand years, and kill individuals, but you don't make any decisions that way. It's not really a war, you're just amusing yourself!
[group laughs mildly]
On the other kind of a war that we can fight is a all out nuclear war. It's cheap. It only takes half an hour.
[group laughs]
And we have all the weapons we need. The capital investment has already been made. The only thing is that after the half hour is over, there's nothing left to do, and very few generals are going to be promoted in that half hour.
[group laughs]
Which instantly kills it for the military.
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And one more thing: If we have a world without racism, ageism, sexism, war...it's gonna be a pretty dull world. Here we have lived all through history with a certain amount of excitement and risk in the world, and it's sort of a shame to sort of sit around this careful cold world of the 21st century and thereafter, in which not only is everybody happy, but everyone's very cautious... Because, you know, we live by slogans. Immediately after World War II, our entire foreign policy was based on the slogan "No more Munich's". Until we got into the Vietnam war by shouting that, and now it's "No more Vietnams". And well, in the 21st century, I'll tell you the slogan right now. Those of you who will live into the 21st century, come put a wreath on my grave, because this will be the slogan: "No more 20th centuries".
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So, everyone is going to be cautious in scientific advances. They're going to ask: "Before we do this, will it destroy the ozone layer? Before we do that is it going to make us too dependent on this or that? What are the side effects? How much cancer will it cause?" You know, that sort of thing. So that you'll be moving very...and you figure what kind of a world is that? You're going to sort of crawl yourself to death!
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Well, in the 21st century we'll have to find a new horizon that's right there; out there. We'll go back to the Moon, only not this time to just get on it and come back. We're going to establish a colony there, and we're going to have a group of people on the Moon who will then be able to make long space flights because they're used to being cooped up and enclosed in an engineering environment subjected to low gravity. And they'll work out other worlds in the solar system.
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And then, you know, we can be as risky as we want. The whole thing...we've always lived with risk, and that's been the great thing about life. The trouble is we've now reached the point where risk is risking everything! And you can't afford to risk everything. Until now in world's history, whenever we've had a dark age, its been temporary and local. And other parts of the world have been doing fine. And eventually, they help you get out of the dark age. We are now facing a possible dark age which is going to be world-wide and permanent! That's not fun. That's a different thing. But once we have established many worlds, we can do whatever we want as long as we do it one world at a time.
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And the interesting thing is that if we can get through the next thirty years, there's no reason why we can't enter into a kind of plateau which will see the human race last, perhaps, indefinitely...till it evolves into better things...and spread out into space indefinitely. We have the choice here between nothing...and the virtually infinite. And the nice thing about it is that you guys in the audience today, when I say guys I mean it in a general term embracing gals...when you guys in the audience today will still be barely middle-aged when you will know which choice has been made.
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But you guys will see for yourself. I hope you see a world in which mankind has decided to be sane. But I must say in all honesty that I figure that the chances are against it.
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04 Oct 13
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31 Mar 08
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What you read here, though timeless, was a product of the time. 1973 saw the end of a lot of optimism carried over from the sixties, and the oil embargo was the first real inconvenience experienced by the baby-boomers of the USA on a nationwide scale. Many middle class families were now requiring two wage-earners, and the cost of living was on the rise.
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I once, when I was not quite nineteen, wrote a story called "Trends". It was the first story I ever sold to John Campbell of the old "Astounding Science Fiction". It appeared in the July 1939 issue.
And in it I dealt with the first flight around the Moon and back. I had it placed in the 1970's. The first attempt, which was a failure, was in 1973. And the second attempt, which was a success, was in 1978. The actual flight took place in 1968, so I was ten years conservative. In addition, my flight was all there was, whereas in real life the flight around the Moon was preceded by all kinds of orbital and sub-orbital flights, and dockings, and mid-course-corrections, and communication satellites, and navigation satellites...everything under the sun.
So you can see how wrong I was. In fact I was even wronger than that because when I wrote my story back in 1939...38, it was printed in 39...When I wrote that story, I had definite ideas on how the space flight was to take place.
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The story was not printed because of any of the engineering details...you should excuse the expression. It was published because I had something in it that the editor had never seen before. I had postulated resistance to space flight. There was a whole organization of people on earth who were sore as anything at the people who were trying to get out into space. They thought people should stay on earth and mind their own business. And this had never been postulated before. Never!
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Well, when I read all of these references I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance...and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance...to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.
For instance, when the stagecoaches came into England, the canal owners objected. Not that they would lose money, although they would, but they feared for humanity. Because as the stagecoaches tore along at fifteen miles an hour, the air whipping past the nostrils of the people on board, would by Bernoulli's Principle, suck all the air out of the lungs.
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15 Apr 07
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The Future of Humanity: a Lecture by Isaac Asimov
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1974
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Well, when I read all of these references I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance...and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance...to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.
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syllogism
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throughout history, mankind has lived in a world of youth. You know, we talk about the youth-centeredness of our culture. There's nothing else it can be. Throughout history, the life expectancy has been somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, depending upon the time and the place. Very few people have lived into middle-age and beyond.
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I think a great many of the fears of witches really represented the fears of the strange appearance of old women...which of course nowadays we don't have because old women look young.
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our youth-centered culture is youth-centered particularly in one important way: education. For years, and centuries, and millennia, it has always been assumed that education is the prerogative of the very young. That there's such a thing as finishing your education.
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We teach kids that to be grown up is to be able to be stupid for the rest of your life.
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In the 21st century, we're going to have to think of education not as a task to be completed, but as a process to be continued.
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The one thing that really separates the human species from all other species of plants or animals, is that we can learn with far greater facility than any other species can. Now, whatever it is that a species can do well, it enjoys doing!
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Whatever it is you do that makes you happy, and adds to the joyousness of the world, is justified. And there will be room for everything. And in an extended life span, if say when you are forty, you decide to start all over again and study Greek, and become a big expert in Greek literature, who's to stop you? I foresee a 21st century in which the educational process will be organized so that every human being has a right to institutional help for education in any field he wishes, in any direction he wishes, at any age he wishes. Education and learning will be the name of the game.
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when it comes to human beings, when we're going to change ourselves, we have to ask what pleases us! And we don't really know.
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I was asked a few days ago...really was, I'm not making this up...whether I didn't think an intellectual elite ought to run the world. And I said, by an intellectual elite, you mean people like me? Because I didn't know what he meant by an intellectual elite. I thought maybe it might mean people like him, in which case no!
[group laughs]
And he said: "Yes, people like you". And I said no, that would be no good because I'm only smart in certain ways, and very stupid in other ways. And if everybody was like me, and we were running the world, we'd all be smart in the same way, and all be stupid in the same way, and it's the stupidness that's going to kill us.
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Well, in the 21st century we'll have to find a new horizon that's right there; out there. We'll go back to the Moon, only not this time to just get on it and come back. We're going to establish a colony there
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I hope you see a world in which mankind has decided to be sane. But I must say in all honesty that I figure that the chances are against it.
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29 Dec 06
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