A strong scientific title is descriptive, brief, specific, and accurate. It also uses key
Even more interesting is the possibility that life on their planets may be in a more advanced stage of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man's societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power and effectiveness
than the individuals have.
It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand year's from now man's societies may have become so close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organism and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and nerve cells that set them in motion.
The explorers of space should be prepared for some' such situation. If they arrive on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism composed of many closely cooperating units.
The units may be "secondary"-machines created millions of years ago by a previous form. of life and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built entirely of metals and other durable materials. If this is the case, they may be much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the familiar car bon cycle.
Such creatures might be relics of a past age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet.
Humans on Earth today are characterized by______.
A.their existence as free and separate beings
B.their capability of living under favorable conditions
C.their great power and effectiveness
D.their strong desire for living in a close-knit society
A、awkward
B、fearful
C、admirable
D、disgusted
Apart from these sciences is philosophy, about which we will talk later. In the first place, all this is pure or theoretical knowledge, sought only for the purpose of understanding, in order to fulfill the need to understand that is intrinsic and con-substantial to man. What distinguishes man from animals is that he knows and needs to know. If man did not know that the world existed, and that the world was of a certain kind, that he was in the world and that he himself was of a certain kind, he wouldn't be man. The technical aspects or applications of knowledge are equally necessary for man and are of the greatest importance, because they also contribute to defining him as man and permit him to pursue a life increasingly more truly human.
But even while enjoying the results of technical progress, man must defend the primacy and autonomy of pure knowledge. Knowledge sought directly for its practical applications will have immediate and foreseeable success, but not the kind of important result whose revolutionary scope is for the most part unforeseen, except by the imagination of the Utopians. Let me recall a well-known example. If the Greek mathematicians had not applied themselves to the investigation of conic section zealously and without the least suspicion that it might someday be useful, it would not have been possible centuries later to navigate far from shore. The first men to study the nature of electricity could not imagine that their experiments, carried on because of mere intellectual curiosity, 'would eventually lead to modern electrical technology, without which we can scarcely conceive of contemporary life.
Pure knowledge is valuable for its own sake, because the human spirit cannot resign itself to ignorance. But, in addition, it is the foundation for practical results that would not have been reached if this knowledge had not been sought disinterestedly.
The author does not include among the sciences the study of
A.literature.
B.chemistry.
C.astronomy.
D.anthropology.
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