The people of Israel have lived 3,700 years without a memorandum of understanding with America and will continue to live without it another 3,700 years.
Eventually there are going to be chips in brains. Imagine if you could just buy knowledge and download it into your head instead of having to learn it. Like in 'The Matrix.' Imagine all the years saved!
To stay sane, I lived in my head, where I could travel and imagine. In my mind, I played a championship game with the Knicks. I won Wimbledon five times. If the Yankees needed a home run, I came to bat.
I dreamed impossible dreams. And the dreams turned out beyond anything I could possibly imagine. You know, from my point of view, I'm the luckiest cat on the planet.
Imagine what I could have done in ten years. I could have learned to speak Japanese. I could have played every RPG video game ever created, and if I spoke Japanese I could have played the foreign ones too! Man, I could have built a spaceship in my backyard and flew it to the moon and back, if I wanted.
It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the processnof doing.
My first ever job after college was as a flight attendant. I wanted to travel and could not afford it, so I decided to get myself a job where I could travel. I did it for two years and had great fun.
While human space travel is daunting, machines - with their indefinitely long lifetimes - could travel the galaxy. It might make little difference to them that bridging the distance from one star to the next could take hundreds of thousands of years or more.
The rapid progress of the sciences makes me sorry, at times, that I was born so soon. Imagine the power that man will have over matter, a few hundred years from now. We may learn how to remove gravity from large masses, and float them over great distances. Agriculture will double its produce with less labor. All diseases will surely be cured... even old age. If only the moral sciences could be improved as well. Perhaps men would cease to be wolves to one another... and human beings could learn to be human.
When it seems impossible that a deep connection with another person could just go away instead of changing form. It seems impossible that you will one day look up and say the words "I used to date someone who lived in that building," referring to a three-year relationship. As simple as if it was a pizza place that is now a dry cleaner's. It happens. Keep walking.
I am not one of those people who believe that MLK achieved more in martyrdom than he could have if he'd lived: imagine what a guiding influence he could have on the world were he still among us.
What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.
I grew up under Communism so we could only learn Russian, and then when Communism fell in 1989 we could learn a few more things and have the freedom to travel and the freedom of speech - and the freedom of dreaming, really.
When people ask us how long does it take for something to manifest, we say, It takes as long as it takes you to release the RESISTANCE. Could be 30 years, could be 40 years, could be 50 years, could be a week. Could be tomorrow afternoon.
I realized all of the possibilities that could exist for me with my camera: all of the images that I could capture, all of the lives I could enter, all of the people I could meet and how much I could learn from them.
Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five
thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from
anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I
could completely imagine his suffering and I replied
that five thousand Chinamen was something I could not
imagine and so it was not interesting. One has to
remember that about imagination, that is when the
world gets dull when everybody does not know what
they can or what they cannot really imagine.