Rohit Gupta

“It’s only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, some madness there. You know? How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“What I’ve been trying to do is trace an extinction event—call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction, or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction—and to place this event in the broader context of life’s history. That history is neither strictly uniformitarian nor catastrophist; rather, it is a hybrid of the two. What this history reveals, in its ups and its downs, is that life is extremely resilient but not infinitely so. There have been very long uneventful stretches and very, very occasionally “revolutions on the surface of the earth.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, “is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“How do we distinguish between traits that are true disabilities and ones that are disabilities mainly because society is not good at adapting for them?”
― Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race