Ramez Naam Quotes

An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything.

We may well blow each other up with atomic weapons before we wipe out all species of life including our own with more gradual means.

the day the asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs, making room for our little primate ancestors to grow big and brainy and to take over the planet.

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related.

We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.

I think Australia is pretty much living the last day on Earth in a lot of ways.

The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

There is a very real danger that we will kill everything on this planet now that we have the technological power to do so.

When you look at Earth from that one picture, the one from space, it's really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.

If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

Unless we, who know better than most world citizens the horror of the mushroom cloud that hangs ominously over us, become active Humanists in word and in deed, we may well condemn our world to awake some day never to view again the "green stillness of the country where we can hear the heart of Nature beat," but instead to crawl about and gasp for breath on limited terrain, surrounded by lakes and seas of molten lava, representing the remnants of that which once we knew as Mother Earth.

What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.

The danger of collective catastrophe … is so great as to be in part a certainty.

It's much more likely that an asteroid will strike the Earth and annihilate life as we know it than AI will turn evil.

We find ourselves heading fully into an era of mass extinction.

The only actual solution is the eventual collapse and demise of civilization... I think it needs to happen, but no one, not even me, really wants it to happen.

I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.

There's no question that if we stay on planet Earth and never leave, that eventually we'll be wiped out.