Existence | The Cosmic Drama – Alan Watts Carl Sagan Neil deGrass Tyson

learn to love the questions themselves because therein are the seeds of all curiosity and wonder my sense is that the scientific way of of thinking questioning some delicate mix of creative encouragement of new ideas and the most rigorous and skeptical scrutiny of new and old ideas i think that is the path to the future not just for science but for all human institutions we have to be willing to challenge because we are in desperate need of change the larger grows the area of knowledge the bigger that area grows just remember so too grows our perimeter of ignorance it may be that as much as we think we know as much as we know we know as much as the more things that we ultimately learn all we know we could be steeped in the center of infinite ignorance i think often about the questions we do not yet know to ask because discoveries yet to come but when they arrive will put us in a new vista a new place to stand enabling us to see questions undreamt of and unimagined before we got there so when i again lay awake at night i ponder what kinds of questions lay beyond our reach because the questions that we even know how to pose they're there those are not even interesting to me anymore because we knew how to ask the question i want to know the question that is beyond everyone's reach i mean we want to be thought of as children being cared for by an omnipotent omniscient and benevolent creator i mean think of all the uncertainties and turmoil and terrors of our life which would be made less terrifying if this were true and yet at the same time i don't feel like so many people seem to feel that i'm a foreigner or a stranger in this world i feel in it as if in the same way when you see a flower in the field it's really the whole field that is flowering because the flower couldn't exist in that particular place without the special surroundings of the field that it has you only find flowers in surroundings which will support them so in the same way you only find human beings on a planet of this kind with an atmosphere of this kind with temperature of this kind supplied by a convenient neighboring star and so just as the flower is a flowering of the field i feel myself as a a person a manning peopling the whole universe in other words i seem like everything else to be a center a sort of vortex at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself comes alive a sort of aperture through which the whole universe is conscious of itself in other words i go with it as a center to a circumference the long-standing view is summarized by the philosopher emmanuel kent that without man the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness a thing in vain and have no final end is revealed to be self-indulgent folly a principle of mediocrity seems to apply to all our circumstances we would not have known beforehand that the evidence would be so repeatedly and thoroughly incompatible with the proposition that human beings are at center stage in the universe but most of the debates have now been settled decisively in favor of a position that however painful can be encapsulated in a single sentence we have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama perhaps someone else has perhaps no one else has in either case we have good reason for humility