That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.

I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind?

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.

The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.