Yes at first it seems Sagan focuses on our infinitesimal place in the infinite space of perhaps multi-trillions of galaxies. But he also examines the history of human activities in the context of deep time and concludes it is ALL up to us, there is no one coming to save us from our own potential de...

I hadn't heard the phrase sub specie aeternitatus before, but I think that's what Carl Sagan called "the cosmic perspective" and wrote about in The Pale Blue Dot . Actually Sagan's perspective is rather different. Pale Blue Dot is about spatial extent, showing how tiny our planet is on co...

I doubt I would have picked up on the Buddhist element given the "Right Speech" step on the Noble Eightfold Path. 🤣 I'll start looking for more now... The occasional profanity in this book should be read as euphemistic, as a way of saying that we should detach from things that are unimpor...

Manson attacks consumerism, observing that people wanting more stuff is good for business, but is bad for mental health, causing attachment to the superficial and fake (p5). This is an important observation of the delusional corruption of values that pervades mass culture. It is superficial to think...

Coming back for a second comment. Too often, “counterintuitive”, the word in the subtitle of this book, is a euphemism for wrong and stupid. That certainly seems the case with the ill-conceived opening example, the bum author Charles Bukowski, with his Yodaesqe epitaph on his gravestone ‘Don’t Try’....

I find that in thinking about whether to join a Booktalk discussion, I sometimes need to have a look at the book first. Knowing that our local suicide prevention charity Lifeline had its regular six-monthly mega book fair last weekend, and knowing that this book would be for sale there, led me to sl...

There is a logical principle here that supervenes any empirical proof. That is, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed, our understanding of reality should begin with analysis of the necessary conditions of experience. That means, we should ask, what must the universe be like in order for our exp...

I'm interested in the dimensions of heaven as the author, you, and Sir Tulip mentioned. The key is the assertion in Rev 21 that the Holy City is a cube with each side 12,000 units long. A series of other Biblical images about this Holy City link it directly to precession of the equinox, symbolising...

brother bob said that Heaven is a 1500 mile cube. Page 212. I don't know if he meant 1500 cubic miles, or 1500^3 cubic miles. I suspect he meant a cube where one side is 1500 miles, which is 1500^3 or 3,375,000,000 cubic miles. I don't know where he got this information. Thanks Murmur for the enter...

Chapter 7, Conference, The theme of the conference is how the numbing catastrophe of the blinding of the world might not produce a complete end of human survival. The speech to the assembled people, “from somber eyes as he waited for the murmuring to die down, … spoke in a pleasant, practiced voice ...