The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in spacetime.
Robin Hanson, ‘The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier’, in Damien Broderick (ed.), Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, New York, 2008, p. 168
If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe. What grater proof of the reality of the Big Bang–you can watch it on TV.
Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, New York, 2012, p. 26
The author Timothy Ferris, who coined the term “lifestyle design,” is a fantastic example of the good things this approach to life can generate (Ferris has more than enough career capital to back up his adventurous existence). But if you spend time browsing the blogs of lesser-known lifestyle designers, you’ll begin to notice the same red flags again and again: A distresingly large fraction of these contrarians […] skipped over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconvetional lifestyle. They assume that generating the courage to pursue control is what matters, while everything else is just a detail that is easily worked out.
One such blogger I found, to give another example from among many, quit his job at the age of twenty-five, explaining, “I was fed up with living a ‘normal’ conventional life, working 9-5 for the man [and] having no time and little money to pursue my true passions… so I’ve embarked on a crusade to show you and the rest of the world how an average Joe… can build a business from scratch to support a life devoted to living ‘The Dream.'” The “business” he referenced, as is the case with many lifestyle designers, was his blog about being a lifestyle designer. In other words, his only product was his enthusiasm about no having a “normal” life. It doesn’t take an economist to point out there’s not much real value lurking there.
Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, New York, 2012, pp. 119-120
All species reproduce in excess, way past the carrying capacity of their niche. In her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1,000 kits; a trout, 20,000 fry, a tuna or cod, a million fry or more; an elm tree, several million seeds; and an oyster, perhaps a hundred million spat. If one assumes that the population of each of these species is, from generation to generation, roughly equal, then on the average only one offspring will survive to replace each parent. All the other thousands and millions will die, one way or another.
Fred Hapgood, Why Males Exist: An Inquiry into the Evolution of Sex, New York, 1979, pp. 44-45
The principle of natural selection is not obviously a humanitarian principle; the predator-prey relation does not depend on moral empathy. Nature ruthlessly limits animal populations by doing violence to virtually every individual before it reaches maturity[.]
Marc Sagoff, ‘Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce’, Osgoode Law Journal, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1984), p. 299
If there is one salient fact we have learned talking with thousands of people about farm animal welfare, it is this: people do not know much about the way farm animals are raised.
Bailey Norwood & Jayson Lusk, Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare, New York, 2011, p. 327
There are phonograph records purporting to contain “the wit and wisdom of Ronald Reagan” which, when played, are entirely silent. It might be suggested that a book on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy should similarly consist only of blank pages.
Jeff McMahan, Reagan and the World: Imperial Policy in the New Cold War, New York, 1985, p. 9
Suffering, by its nature, is awful, and so one needs an excellent reason to cause it. Occasionally, one will have such a reason. Surgery may cause a human being severe postoperatory pain, but the surgeon may be right to operate if that’s the only way to save the patient.
And what if the sufferer is not a human, but an animal? This doesn’t matter. The underlying principle is that suffering is bad because of what it’s like for the sufferer. Whether the sufferer is a person or a pig or a chicken is irrelevant, just as it’s irrelevant whether the sufferer is white or black or brown. The question is merely how awful the suffering is to the individual.
Stuart Rachels, ‘Vegetarianism’, in T. L. Beauchamp & R. G. Frey (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, Oxford, 2012, pp. 883-884