Dr. Mae C. Jemison, First African-American Woman in Space - - Once I got intospace, I was feeling very comfortable in theuniverse. I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe, that I belonged here as much as any speck ofstardust, anycomet, anyplanet. -Mae C. Jemison.
Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an Americanengineer,physician, and formerNASA astronaut. She became the firstblack woman to travel into space when she served as amission specialist aboard theSpace ShuttleEndeavour. Jemison joined NASA'sastronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for theSTS-47 mission, during which she orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992. Jemison left NASA in 1993 and founded a technology research company. She later formed a non-profit educational foundation and through the foundation is the principal of the100 Year Starship project funded byDARPA.
The difference betweenscience andthe arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin, even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they're manifestations of the same thing...They spring from the same source. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us. It's our attempt to influence things, the universe internal to ourselves and external to us.
Once I got intospace, I was feeling very comfortable in theuniverse. I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe, that I belonged here as much as any speck ofstardust, anycomet, any planet.
Never be limited by other people’s limitedimaginations… If you adopt their attitudes, then thepossibility won’t exist because you’ll have already shut it out… You can hear other people’s wisdom, but you’ve got to re-evaluate the world for yourself.
If we describe the near future as 10, 20, 15 years from now, that means that what we do today is going to be critically important, because in the year 2015, in the year 2020, 2025, the world our society is going to be building on, the basic knowledge and abstract ideas, the discoveries that we came up with today, just as all these wonderful things we're hearing about here at the TED conference that we take for granted in the world right now, were really knowledge and ideas that came up in the 50s, the 60s and the 70s.
People have this idea that science and the arts are really separate; we think of them as separate and different things. And this idea was probably introduced centuries ago, but it's really becoming critical now, because we're making decisions about our society every day that, if we keep thinking that the arts are separate from the sciences, and we keep thinking it's cute to say, "I don't understand anything about this one, I don't understand anything about the other one," then we're going to have problems.
People talk about the '60s all the time. And they talk about the anarchy that was there. But when I think about the '60s, what I took away from it was that there was hope for the future.
The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us. It's our attempt to influence things, the universe internal to ourselves and external to us.
We had someone talk about measuring emotions and getting machines to figure out what to keep us from acting crazy. No, we shouldn't measure. We shouldn't use machines to measure road rage and then do something to keep us from engaging in it. Maybe we can have machines help us to recognize that we have road rage, and then we need to know how to control that without the machines.
We need to revitalize the arts and sciences today. We need to take responsibility for the future. We can't hide behind saying it's just for company profits, or it's just a business, or I'm an artist or an academician.
