Henne

“If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could have more time yet: trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.”
― Toby Ord, The Precipice

“I want you to frame a question, as sharp and clear as possible—one to which you do not yet know the answer, but desperately want to know, and expect someday to know. Pretend to be David Hilbert. The Millennium is approaching. Issue a challenge to the quantum theorists of the 21st century. List the key questions they should seek to answer. Hard questions, but not hopelessly hard, questions whose answers could transform our understanding of how the physical world works. I need to know what the question is. Then, perhaps, I can be more engaged in the search for the answer.”
― John Preskill

“What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.

Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.

If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.”
― Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume 3

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. ”
― Steven Weinberg