Word: mankinde
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This crew flew into that anniversary and marked the moment on board. Mission chief Rick Husband called for a moment of silence. "They made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives to their country and mankind," he said of the astronauts of Challenger and Apollo 1, whose three astronauts died in a launch-pad fire in January 1967. "Their dedication was an inspiration to each of us." It would be cheaper and safer to explore space with cameras and computers rather than men and women. But something would be lost as well, something brave and passionate that was sent...
...tempting to view that headlong progress as integral to the human condition, but it was not always so. For the most part, cultural development has moved more slowly than glaciers, imperceptible to those who participated in it. As the historical philosopher Ronald Wright observed, for 99.5% of mankind's existence "the human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death." Nothing ever changed, for generation upon generation...
Right from the start, the nuclear age was wrapped in a paradox. An awful weapon had saved lives; a terrible instrument of war had brought peace. The images from Hiroshima seared the consciousness of a generation, forever serving as an admonishing reminder of mankind's destructive capacities. "In an instant, without warning, the present had become the unthinkable future," TIME wrote one week after the dropping of the bomb. And yet the very memory of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of cities being reduced to rubble in an instant, provided an odd hope that such terror would never...
...victory in war worth that much indignity inflicted on mankind...
...Koran's description of heaven. In 2004 the executioners of Nick Berg, an American contractor in Iraq, alluded on tape to a different Koranic passage: "Whoever kills a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be regarded as having killed all mankind." The spirit of that verse forbids aggressive warfare, but the clause beginning with except is readily deployed by militant Muslims as a loophole. If you want murder and villainy in the land, they say, look no further than U.S. bootprints in Arab soil...