Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?

I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

Many, and some of the most pressing, of our terrestrial problems can be solved only by going into space. Long before it was a vanishing commodity, the wilderness as the preservation of the world was proclaimed by Thoreau. In the new wilderness of the Solar System may lie the future preservation of mankind.

Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.

One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.