There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earththat even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars,
I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs tothe Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The exis-tence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasurebeyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think,
supersede any other possible use of Mars. However, suppose Marsis lifeless. It is not a plausible source of raw materials: the freight-agefrom Mars to Earth would be too expensive formany centuries to come. But might we be able to live on Mars? Could we in some sense make Mars habitable. - P139
So seventeenth-century Holland was the home of thegreat Jewish philosopher Spinoza, whom Einstein admired; ofDescartes, a pivotal figure in the history of mathematics and philosophy; and of John Locke, a political scientist who influenced agroup of philosophically inclined revolutionaries named Paine,
Hamilton, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson. Never before or sincehas Holland been graced by such a galaxy of artists and scientists,
philosophers and mathematicians. This was the time of the master painters Rembrandt and Vermeer and Frans Halls; of Leeu-wenhoek, the inventor of the microscope; of Grotius, the founderof international law, of Willebrord Snellius, who discovered thelaw of the refraction of light. - P147
The themes of space and time are, as we have seen, intertwined. Worlds and stars, like people, are born, live and die. Thelifetime of a human being is measured in decades; the lifetime ofthe Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, weare like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out theirwhole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view ofa mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. Fromthe point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one ofbillions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of astrangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere ofsilicate and iron. - P228
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