“On our present course, this may eventually stand as the ultimate achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens. We should take a bow. We are obviously planet killers. The question is, can we also be planet saviors? I'd say that seems unlikely. Happy Earth Day.”

— Caitlín R. Kiernan

(22 April 2004)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004

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Caitlín R. Kiernan 45

writer 1964

Yakoub Islam

"Commence Commence Commence" (24 July 2011) 
Captain Jul's Mission Blog (2011 - 2013)
Context: I'm a long-haul Cosmic anthropologist, which means I hop around isolate-planets (like Earth) in order to study Advanced Language Species (like homo sapiens). I specialise in First Stage Globalization (FSG) terrestrials. Most FSG planets have whole-world silicon-based communication technologies in situ, and thus as soon as I’m near enough, I ’plug in’, and shortly after make contact. Well, I’ve been plugged in for quite some time, but this is my first contact. Sorry about that.

“We are consuming the past, present, and future of this biosphere, our only home, in an unthinking rush for profits and GDP that we call 'progress', belying our species name homo sapiens.”

Pavan Sukhdev (1960) Indian environmental economist

Foreword to Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries https://books.google.it/books?id=CxHuA5AZ92AC&pg=PR0 by Anders Wijkman and Johan Rockström (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), p. xi.

“We (Ecuador) may be a small territory... but the planet (earth) is also ours.”

Guillermo Lasso (1955) President of Ecuador

Source: Guillermo Lasso (2021) cited in: " Ecuador expands sea life protections around Galapagos https://phys.org/news/2022-01-ecuador-sea-life-galapagos.html" in phys.org, 15 January 2022.

“Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Microsoft has a long history of taking a principled approach to how we live up to our mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more with technology platforms and tools, while also standing up for our enduring values and ethics.”

Satya Nadella (1967) CEO of Microsoft appointed on 4 February 2014

The Verge: "Microsoft CEO plays down ICE contract in internal memo to employees" https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17482500/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-ice-contract-memo (20 June 2018)

“There is a further advantage [to hydrogen bombs]: the supply of uranium in the planet is very limited, and it might be feared that it would be used up before the human race was exterminated, but now that the practically unlimited supply of hydrogen can be utilized, there is considerable reason to hope that homo sapiens may put an end to himself, to the great advantage of such less ferocious animals as may survive. But it is time to return to less cheerful topics.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), part I, "The World of Science", chapter 3, "The World of Physics", p. 41
1940s

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 193

“Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

54 min 25 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]

“On our present course, this may eventually stand as the ultimate achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens. We should take a bow. We are obviously planet killers. The question is, can we also be planet saviors? I'd say that seems unlikely. Happy Earth Day.”

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Caitlín R. Kiernan 45

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