We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.
Edgar MitchellRead
We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need for humanity to recognize our place in a larger cosmic community.
Edgar Mitchell's quote highlights the crucial moment in human history where we must acknowledge our connection to other inhabited planets. It suggests that just as a community must recognize its neighbors, humanity must expand its perspective beyond Earth and accept that we are part of a broader universe filled with potential life, fostering a sense of unity and responsibility towards this expanded community.
In practice
Using this quote during a panel discussion on space exploration and humanity's future.
We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.
We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.
We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it's creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us.
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty.
My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.
I experienced an ecstasy of unity. I not only saw the connectedness, I felt it and experienced it sentiently. The restraints and boundaries of flesh and bone fell away.
An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.
Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.
C'este donc par l'étude des mathématiques, et seulement par elle, que l'on peut se faire une idée juste et approfondie de ce que c'est qu'une science.
It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.
Since, then, there is no objection to the mobility of the Earth, I think it must now be considered whether several motions are appropriate for it, so that it can be regarded as one of the wandering stars. For the fact that it is not the centre of all revolutions is made clear by the apparent irregular motion of the wandering stars, and their variable distances from the Earth, which cannot be understood in a circle having the same centre as the Earth.
I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.
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