The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.

We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

According to the Dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings.

At present scientists do not look for alternatives simply because they do not care enough about the animals they are using.

Charitable giving is a huge sector in the United States. It amounts to $350 billion a year. And yet, I can't help feeling that a lot of that is wasted because people have not been thinking about how to do it as effectively as possible.

With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.

Sci-fi is often a metaphor. I think it's more the themes and questions that science fiction raises rather than the exact predictions that should guide us.