“…sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

Carl Sagan wrote these prescient words more than twenty years ago:

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” – Carl Sagan, A Demon Haunted World

And it was his contemporary who proposed a solution:

“We must all pledge ourselves to recovering accessible science as an honorable intellectual tradition. The rules are simple: no compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas (any conceptual complexity can be conveyed in ordinary english).” – Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus