The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

But I could be wrong.

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

To read is to voyage through time.

If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off.

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan