To attain that goal we had to lead a special kind of life which, while leaving us Christians, had made us alien to the Christian world.

I will allow you to regain your honor and the honor of your house through seppuku, death by your own hand, so that you may show courage and dignity in death

Well, I'd have to check with my lawyer, but I don't think retail therapy is a viable legal strategy.

There was no day when humanity came together, separate in all of those things and just shared it together -- that we're in this together, and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated, then that might be the key to humanity's survival.

(Laughter) And yet, of course, it's what we have created, and it's what we must undo if we are to survive.

No, on the contrary, they changed, up to a point where we now have 70 percent support for keeping the charges, meaning that -- I mean, let me repeat that: 70 percent of the population in Stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be free.

We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know, continue to be the thing that makes us special, or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson.

It's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience.

Now the third area is the one that I want to focus on the most, and that's the category of existential risks: events like a nuclear war or a global pandemic that could permanently derail civilization or even lead to the extinction of the human race.

Another example from my hometown in Philadelphia: I recently went to the public library there, and they are facing an existential crisis.

I thought of the Zunis, whose offerings ensure that their culture is not dead and gone but alive and well, and I could think of no better place for the War Gods to be.

So this is another very serious problem, and the basic problem is prostitution, because there's not a whorehouse in America that's not known by the local officials, the local policemen, or the chief of police or the mayor and so forth.

Cohorts of the dinosaurs, sea turtles have survived through the challenges of eons, existing still today, where many others have ended their evolutionary run.

And so here I was saying, OK, I hear you, I understand what you're saying, but try also to understand what I'm saying because if you do not cut your emissions, then our survival is on the line.

(Laughter) Nonviolent struggle works by destroying an opponent, not physically, but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive, and then denying them those sources of power.

As both predator and prey, survival of their species depended on crucial instinctual behaviors which we still observe in wild and domestic cats today.

From conflict zones to climate change to all sorts of issues around crises in public health, we were missing what I call the species-level issues, because as a species, they could actually sink us.

That's actually an optimistic observation, because it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be, and must be, the facilitators of cultural survival.

Because like all ancient villages, Villagrande couldn't have survived without this structure, without its walls, without its cathedral, without its village square, because defense and social cohesion defined its design.

The split starts to emerge between those in the military who see a future they can live with, and those who see a future that starts to scare them, like the U.S. submarine community, which watches the Soviet Navy disappear overnight.

Although the vent sites are short-lived -- an individual site may last only 10 years or so -- as an ecosystem they've been stable for millions -- well, billions -- of years.

The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing.

Something else is, because if that doesn't survive, we are not here; there are no mammals. It's that close; one species ekes through.

My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world, and help ensure the survival of what actually -- as it turns out -- is my favorite species; that would be us.

So, ultimately what's going to determine the success or failure of SETI is the longevity of technologies, and the mean distance between technologies in the cosmos -- distance over space and distance over time.

But though the idea of a secret group orchestrating political upheaval is still alive and well today, there is no evidence that the Illuminati survived, reformed, or went underground.

At that time at the beginning of the '90s, we had that problem, which was, you know, survival below one side, but what was really painful for me was, remember, the beginning of the '90s, Yugoslavia is falling apart.

Nature didn't need to because, unlike the abalone shell, the survival of a species didn't depend on building those materials, until maybe now when it might just matter.