¶ Biosphere (1)
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Index Entry
Q: Do you think there will be habitable satellites with their own atmosphere?
RBF: “Why not? I don’t see how we can help it.”
Q: How do you think they will affect the Earth?
RBF: “Very, very greatly. Only recently have we known that there was some mystical element called air and that it broke down into oxygen and other parts, and that oxygen was necessary for the lungs and knowing what it does to the blood. The point is that there was this a priori inventory of resources and behaviors of nature that made it possible for man to be born absolutely helpless and ignorant. With beautiful equipment, but helpless. Therefore, part of the invention of having a species born absolutely helpless was that it had to be looked out for. And so the air was the way you could breathe. A mother wouldn’t have known how to invent a breast, or how to invent the oxygen” for her baby. “So we did have all these things and they’ve been so plentiful, they have permitted man to be really very ignorant, and also his being very wasteful.”
¶ Citations
- WATTS TAPL, pp. 1-2, 19 Oct '70
