Human Fragility
Lewis Thomas:
This [the universe] is a very big place, and I do not know how it works, nor how I fit in. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only for a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error-prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that.
The Fragile Species, p. 25