Alan Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the closest thing America has to a frontier today? It’s not space anymore, if it ever was. It’s not Maine. No, it’s not Maine. I certainly hope Americans will not regard going into space as something that millions of people are going to be able to do and be able to survive on, say, Mars. I think that’s a complete folly and waste of money. The reality is, we live on this planet which has a very thin atmosphere, and that and our geomagnetic field are — and the existence of a moon — are rare things. Certainly they’re unique in our solar system. What’s beyond that is utterly inhospitable, to say the least, to our bodies. There is no real frontier anymore, anywhere in the world. Yes, there are places that are more thinly settled than others. You could say Alaska is still a frontier, but large numbers of people are not going to be able to expand into Alaska. It’s not going to be able to support a lot of people. As a consequence, we’re stuck on this planet, and we have to figure out how to make the best of it and sustain it. I have just some general questions about doing history. Just a simple physicalist question: What’s the most difficult thing? I don’t mean intellectually, but just on your body or on your eyes or on your behind, the hardest thing about doing the work of history.…

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