The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life.
“It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.”
Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 73
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Carl Sagan 365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996Related quotes
God Is An Iron (1977)
Context: "It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand? That lemming drive you're talking about is there — but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and—" She paused, looked down at herself. "And I wouldn't be here to say them."
De Abaitua interview (1998)
As quoted in Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson, p. 123
2010s
"The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier", p. 365
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
To Leon Goldensohn, July 20, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004