quote of the day

"All of this is the Earth educating itself. Think of the language that has
come alive in just this one afternoon: Do you think we are solely
responsible for that? Good heavens, no! Think of the sacrifices required of
billions of creatures to make such language possible.

"Take a single sentence: 'The fireball exploded twenty billion years ago at
the beginning of time.' That sentence required nothing less than the full
twenty billion years of cosmic development.

"It is not 'my' sentence; nor does it 'belong' to the theoretical scientists
who first predicted the existence of the fireball, nor the experimental
scientists who first detected its heat; it is a sentence of the whole Earth.
Nothing less than that is required for its speaking forth.

"The sentence could not exist without the oceans, the rivers, the air, the
life forms, and all the thousands of years of human cultural activities.
Every sentence is spoken by the whole Earth."

- Brian Swimme