We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.

The extinction rate is so huge now, we're to the stage where we've got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.

There are a few societies that show signs of having been very rational about the physics of construction and the physics of real life. Some of the old middle-Eastern societies had downdraft systems over whole cities, and passive, rapid-evaporation ice-making systems. They were rational people using good physical principles to make themselves comfortable without additional sources of energy.

If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.

I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.