What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb "to believe" we're trying to use the verb "to explore". We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

You cannot fully realize your own self in isolation. It's a collective effort; your uniqueness is essentially shaped by everyone else in the world. Everyone else plays a role in sculpting your distinct identity. Individuality is essentially a community project.

The people of the world are gambling for colossal stakes. Two centuries of scientific enquiry, founded in basic physics and powerful evidence, indicate that the risks from a changing climate over the next hundred years and beyond are immense.

Our informational environment has flipped from scarcity to abundance in a similar way that our food environment has. The heuristics we had living on the plains of Africa in an environment of food scarcity served us well there. But in the environment of Netflix, Ben & Jerrys Ice Cream and La-Z-Boy recliners, these same heuristics give us less than ideal outcomes.

There's an innate tendency in human-beings to sort ourselves by how much we want power. Some of us don't want it at all, some of us are absolutely obsessed with it. The interaction between the individual and the system is therefore critical.