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Quote by Edgar Mitchell

“Let me put it in a rather larger picture framework. Let's go to the longest time frame, the time frame of the life of our sun. As a star, our sun is about halfway through its life cycle. In the long run, we only have a couple of billion more years likely that we can inhabit this planet. By that time, we're going to have to be out of here before our sun dies. Now, I don't think we need to wait that long, and we certainly shouldn't wait that long. At the moment, we are not on a sustainable path.”

Quote by Edgar Mitchell

Author

Edgar Mitchell, an American astronaut born on September 17, 1930, and passed away on February 4, 2016. He was the second person to walk on the Moon as the command module pilot of Apollo 11 mission in 1969. more

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“So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.”

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“We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.”

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“Another way to think of this is there are now 6.8 billion people on this planet, and half of them weren't even born when we went to the moon, and so they don't have the perspective.”

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“At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.”

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“There is a major problem of unsustainability of our environment, and we're seeing it in our natural resources, peak oil is probably upon us, and it can't be sustained. We're on an unsustainable path, and at this point in history we are responsible for that. We're going to have to change our ways. We're going to have to think through this problem.”

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“Certainly whatever climate change and global warming means, we've got a big issue here. Right now, this civilization or this period that we're in is probably going to need the resources off our planet, perhaps the resources from the asteroids, perhaps there will be some on the moon, perhaps some on Mars that we can utilize for our own uses here.”

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“It's rather clear that we've got to do something differently â€" and going into space and learning to utilize these resources, to think differently about ourselves, is vital right now.”

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“Undoubtedly we will go on to Mars in due course, provided we don't blow ourselves up with our stupidities in the short run. That's a possibility, too.”

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“It's starting to catch hold, and in large measure it's because we're starting to understand that much of what we have talked about in ancient mythology and mystical experience and so forth can pretty well be modeled within the world of quantum physics. That's a 20th century phenomenon also.”

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“Perhaps people need to understand some history here. Rene Descartes, in the late 16th, early 17th century, postulated that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality that didn't interact. On a positive side, it got the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the Church.”

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Author:Edgar Mitchell