How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the dominance of the oceans on our planet, questioning the suitability of the name 'Earth.'
Arthur C. Clarke's quote invites reflection on the profound significance of the oceans in defining our planet. It suggests that the vastness and importance of the oceans should lead us to reconsider our labeling of Earth, highlighting our connection to water and nature rather than just land. This perspective encourages a deeper appreciation of the environmental context in which humanity exists.
In practice
During a lecture on climate change, I used this quote to highlight the importance of protecting our oceans.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
Never limit your view of life by any past experience.
Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
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