Time & Perspective Quote by Fred Saberhagen

Certainty gets demoted to a temporary job in Saberhagen's line: hired for the moment, replaced as soon as new data walks in the door. The bite is in the clause "or think we know" - a quiet jab at human swagger, and especially at the kind of confident lore that hardens into dogma. He's not just talking about astrophysics; he's talking about the psychology of knowledge in an era when yesterday's settled model becomes today's charming misunderstanding.

As a science-fiction author, Saberhagen is writing from inside a genre built on the volatility of "known facts". Sci-fi doesn't merely predict gadgets; it dramatizes the consequences of paradigm shifts. By framing the universe explicitly as "space and time", he points at the deepest layer of the worldview stack: not opinions, not policies, but the basic scaffolding we use to imagine reality. When that scaffolding starts moving, every story about progress, destiny, and human scale gets rewritten.

The phrasing "changing very quickly" carries the cultural timestamp of late-20th-century acceleration: the sense that discovery isn't a slow march but a series of sudden edits. It's an invitation to intellectual humility, but also a subtle permission slip for wonder. If our map of reality keeps updating, then the frontier isn't just out there in the cosmos - it's in the assumptions we carry around like they're permanent.