Marius Catalin
https://www.goodreads.com/mariuscatalin
Dark matter is the elusive stuff in the Universe that interacts through gravity like ordinary matter, but that doesn’t emit or absorb light. Astronomers detect its gravitational influence, but they literally don’t see it.
“Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.”
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
“It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.”
― The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
― The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
“Climate change is fast, much faster than it seems we have the capacity to recognize and acknowledge; but it is also long, almost longer than we can truly imagine.”
― The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
― The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
“When the Ancient Persians had a big political decision to make they would debate the matter twice: once drunk, and once sober. If they came to the same conclusion both times, they acted.”
― A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present
― A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present
“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”
― Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
― Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Romania
— 4858 members
— last activity Jan 14, 2026 11:34PM
Grupul Romania, deschis tuturor celor de nationalitate romana, rudelor si prietenilor acestora, indiferent de unde sunt, locuiesc, traiesc prin lume. ...more
Goodreads România
— 3547 members
— last activity Jan 27, 2026 12:03PM
Salut, începe aici. Ai o carte pe care vrei s-o discuți cu alții? vezi ce cărți avem în bibliotecă și poți să îți găsești un partener de lectură. ...more
Cărți în limba română
— 1385 members
— last activity Aug 07, 2025 08:40AM
Cărți în limba română - autori străini sau români (Carti in limba romana - autori straini sau romani)
Science and Inquiry
— 4482 members
— last activity Jan 22, 2026 05:20PM
This Group explores scientific topics. We have an active monthly book club, as well as discussions on a variety of topics including science in the new ...more
Marius’s 2025 Year in Books
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