EQUALITY OF MISERY/CONTENTMENT

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A belief is not merely an idea that the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.”

—Robert Bolton

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We speak for Earth.

-Carl Sagan

//////////////////BIOSPHERE, ECOSPHERE, THIN GREEN SMEAR

///////////////////REGOLITH, WEATHERING, EROSION, ROCK CYCLE

/////////////////////A combination of just the right size and composition (especially the presence of water) and optimal distance from the Sun make the surface conditions on Earth perfectly suited for hosting life

//////////////////////Psychologists have discovered that daydreaming allows certain ideas and problems to "marinate" in our unconscious minds, allowing us to think of new possibilities and solutions, even when we aren't working on a problem directly.

///////////////////////////////What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque."-SAGAN

////////////////////// "one day, many of us could gaze at the encyclopadia that contains the coordinates of perhaps hundreds of Earth-like planets in our sector of the galaxy. Then we will ponder with wonder, as Sagan did, what an intelligent civilization a millions years ahead of ours will look like." KAKU

//////////////////////most potentially interesting civilization is a Type III civilization, "for it is truly immortal. It has exhausted the power of a single star, and has reached out to other star systems. No natural catastrophe known to science has the capacity to destroy a Type III civilization."

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CIVILISATIONS MAY BE RANKED by their energy consumption, using the following principles:

• The four laws of thermodynamics 

• The laws of stable matter. Matter in the universe clumps into three large groupings: planets, stars and galaxies.

• The laws of planetary evolution. Any advanced civilisation must grow in energy consumption faster than the frequency of life-threatening catastrophes, such as meteor impacts, ice ages, supernova explosions, and so on. If their growth rate stays any slower, they are doomed to extinction. Thus, this places mathematical lower limits on the growth rates of these civilisations. KAKU

//////////////////////////Our best bet for a theory of everything is M-theory --an extension of string theory," Hawking 

/////////////////////the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe."penrose

//////////////////////Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe" (WMAP) mission has measured these variations and found that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and it consists of 4.6% atoms, 23% dark matter, and 72% dark energy

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