Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
Science is, very simply, our future.
If someone asks me what differentiates Homo sapiens from the million other species on this planet, the answer is “not much”. We share about 90 percent of our DNA with everything you’ll find at the local zoo. However, we don’t share an interest in music, literature, theology or art. We have creative and aesthetic talents that are singular - on this world, at least.
That’s nice, and it makes life both pleasant and meaningful. But alone among human endeavors, only science can give us a future. Only science can offer an understanding of the cosmos with which we can innoculate ourselves against destruction, either by our own hand or as the consequence of some external calamity.
Most people think of science as helping to make the good life possible. It surely does that. But science can gift us with more than just la dolce vita. It can transform an accident of evolution on a small, rocky world into a significant fact of the universe.
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"Science is, very simply, our future."
I *wish* I had thought of this line. :)