Wednesday, April 25, 2012

E.O. Wilson's Life On Earth

The E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation has gathered together a contributor team consisting of educators, multimedia artists, 3D animators trained in science and cinema, and textbook professionals, led by naturalist Edward O. Wilson.



E.O.Wilson interview about his new book The Social Conquest of Earth

Do you believe science will help us in time?
We can't predict what science is going to come up with, particularly on genuine frontiers like astrophysics. So much can change even within a single decade. A lot more is going to happen when the social sciences finally join the biological sciences: who knows what will come out of that in terms of describing and predicting human behaviour? But there are certain things that are almost common sense that we should not do.

What sort of things shouldn't we do?
Continue to put people into space with the idea that this is the destiny of humanity. It makes little sense to continue exploration by sending live astronauts to the moon, and much less to Mars and beyond. It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. It's a commonly stated idea that we can have other planets to live on once we have used this one up. That is nonsense. We can find what we need right here on this planet for almost infinite lengths of time, if we take good care of it.

What is it important to do now?
The title of my final chapter is "A New Enlightenment". I think we ought to have another go at the Enlightenment and use that as a common goal to explain and understand ourselves, to take that self-understanding which we so sorely lack as a foundation for what we do in the moral and political realm. This is a wonderful exercise. It is about education, science, evaluating the creative arts, learning to control the fires of organised religion and making a better go of it.

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