Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (TV Mini Series)

The Immortals (2014)

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Self - Host

Quotes 

• Self - Host : So, you could say Gilgamesh fulfilled his quest for immortality. We still read the Epic of Gilgamesh, and with every reader, he lives again. And all those heroes and superheroes who have come since follow in the footsteps of the first hero's journey another kind of immortality; a story sent from one civilization to another across thousands of years.

• Self - Host : Being able to adapt our behavior to challenges is as good a definition of intelligence as any I know.

• Self - Host : But life itself sends its own stories across billions of years. It's a message that every one of us carries inside, inscribed in all the cells of our bodies, in a language that all life on Earth can read. The genetic code is written in an alphabet consisting of only four letters. Each letter is a molecule made of atoms; each word is three letters long. Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution; the instructions for running and reproducing the intricate machinery of life.

• Self - Host : If our greater intelligence is the hallmark of our species, then we should use it, as all other beings use their distinctive advantages to help ensure that their offspring prosper, and their heredity is passed on, and that the fabric of nature that sustains us is protected. Human intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen. The ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired tendencies, sometimes themselves disguised as the light of reason, is worrisome. But if our intelligence is the only edge, we must learn to use it better. To sharpen it. To understand its limitations and deficiencies. To use it as cats use stealth before pouncing. As walking sticks use camouflage. To make it the tool of our survival. If we do this, we can solve almost any problem we are likely to confront in the next 100,000 years.

• Self - Host : By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We are an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby star systems on our interstellar arks. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses; more confident, far-seeing, capable and wise. For all our failings, despite our flaws and limitations, we humans are capable of greatness.

• [last lines] 

  Self - Host : What new wonders, undreamt of in our time, will we have accomplished in another generation and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century, and the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by their knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe came from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.