Tribute to
Carl Sagan - 1934-1996
IN HIS OWN
WORDS...
ON THE COSMOS:
"The Cosmos is all that is or
ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of
the Cosmos stir us-there is a tingling in the spine, a
catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant
memory, of falling from a height. We know we are
approaching the greatest of mysteries."
-"The Shores of the Cosmic
Ocean," Cosmos, p. 4.
ON EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE:
"There are some hundred billion
(1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred
billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as
many planets as stars, 1011 x 1011 = 1022, ten billion
trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what
is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun,
is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we,
tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be
so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the
universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do
not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations.
The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck
of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight,
and at this distance utterly lost."
-"The Shores of the Cosmic
Ocean," Cosmos, p. 7.
ON DISCOVERING EXTRATERRESTRIAL
INTELLIGENCES:
"The receipt of a message from an
advanced civilization will show that there are advanced
civilizations, that there are methods of avoiding the
self-destruction that seems so real a danger of our
present technological adolescence. ...Finding a solution
to a problem is helped enormously by the certain
knowledge that a solution exists. This is one of many
curious connections between the existence of intelligent
life elsewhere and the existence of intelligent life on
Earth."
-"Knowledge is Our
Destiny," The Dragons of Eden, p. 234.
ON EXPLORING THE COSMOS:
"This is the time when humans
have begun to sail the sea of space. The modern ships
that ply the Keplerian trajectories to the planets are
unmanned. They are beautifully constructed,
semi-intelligent robots exploring unknown worlds."
-"Travelers' Tales,"
Cosmos, p. 138.
ON THE VIEW OF EARTH FROM 3.7
BILLION MILES AWAY AS A PALE BLUE DOT:
"Look again at that dot. That's
here. That's home, That's us. On it everyone you love,
everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every
human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The
aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of
confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines,
every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every
creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and
peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and
father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every
teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every
'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and
sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a
mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. ... There is
perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human
conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To
me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more
kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the
pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
-"You Are Here," Pale Blue
Dot, pp. 8-9.
ON COMETS:
"Comets approach the Sun, flicker
a few hundred times, and die like moths around a flame.
But a vast repository of them waits at the periphery of
the Solar System. When the present configuration of
continents is unrecognizably altered, when the Earth is
engulfed by the expanding Sun, when, in its dotage, our
star feebly illuminates the charred remains of this
planet - then, even then, the skies will still be
brightened as young comets, newly arrived from the
interstellar dark, make their wild perihelion passages.
When the rest of the solar system is dead, and the
descendants of humans long ago emigrated or extinct, the
comets will still be here."
-"A Mote of Dust," Comet,
p. 372.
ON CHILDHOOD:
"As soon as I was old enough, my
parents gave me my first library card. I think the
library was on 85th Street, an alien land. Immediately,
I asked the librarian for something on stars. She
returned with a picture book displaying portraits of men
and women with names like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. I
complained, and for some reason then obscure to me, she
smiled and found another book - the right kind of book.
I opened it breathlessly and read until I found it. The
book said something astonishing, a very big thought. It
said that the stars were suns, only very far away. The
Sun was a star, but close up."
-"The Backbone of Night,"
Cosmos, p. 168.
ON CHILDHOOD DREAMS OF BEING AN
ASTRONOMER:
"When I was twelve, my
grandfather asked me-through a translator (he had never
learned much English)-what I wanted to be when I grew
up. I answered, 'An astronomer,' which, after a while,
was also translated. 'Yes,' he replied, 'but how will
you make a living?' I had supposed that, like all the
adult men I knew, I would be consigned to a dull,
repetitive, and uncreative job; astronomy would be done
on weekends. It was not until my second year in high
school that I discovered that some astronomers were paid
to pursue their passion. I was overwhelmed with joy; I
could pursue my interest full-time."
-"Preface," The Cosmic
Connection, p. vii.
ON THE BRAIN:
"The human brain seems to be in a
state of uneasy truce, with occasional skirmishes and
rare battles. The existence of brain components with
predispositions to certain behavior is not an invitation
to fatalism or despair: we have substantial control over
the relative importance of each component. Anatomy is
not destiny, but it is not irrelevant either."
-"The Future Evolution of the
Brain," The Dragons of Eden, p. 189.
ON GENES, BRAINS, AND BOOKS:
"When our genes could not store
all the information necessary for survival, we slowly
invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten
thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than
could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned
to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside
our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so
far as we know, to have invented a communal memory
stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The
warehouse of that memory is called the library.
A book is made from a tree. It is an
assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called
"leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented
squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of
another person-perhaps someone dead for thousands of
years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking,
clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions,
binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who
never knew one another. Books break the shackles of
time, proof that humans can work magic."
-"The Persistence of
Memory," Cosmos, p. 281.
ON PSEUDOSCIENCE:
"I worry that, especially as the
Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition
will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of
unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we
heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national
prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during
challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we
agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose,
or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits
of thought familiar from ages past reach for the
controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of
light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to
stir."
-"Science and Hope," The
Demon-Haunted World, pp. 26-27.
WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE NONSENSE:
"Such reports persist and
proliferate because they sell. And they sell, I think,
because there are so many of us who want so badly to be
jolted out of our humdrum lives, to rekindle that sense
of wonder we remember from childhood, and also, for a
few of the stories, to be able, really and truly, to
believe-in Someone older, smarter, and wiser who is
looking out for us. Faith is clearly not enough for many
people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They
long for the scientific seal of approval, but are
unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of
evidence that impart credibility to that seal."
-"The Man in the Moon and the
Face on Mars," The Demon-Haunted World, p. 58.
ON SCIENCE LITERACY:
"All inquiries carry with them
some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the
universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do
not see how we can deal with the universe-both the
outside and the inside universe-without studying it. The
best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general
to be scientifically literate, to understand the
implications of such investigations. In exchange for
freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain
their work. If science is considered a closed
priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average
person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater.
But if science is a topic of general interest and
concern - if both its delights and its social
consequences are discussed regularly and competently in
the schools, the press, and at the dinner table - we
have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the
world really is and for improving both it and us."
-"Broca's Brain," Broca's
Brain, p. 12.
ON SCIENCE AND UNCERTAINTY:
"We will always be mired in
error. The most each generation can hope for is to
reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body
of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a
pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of
our knowledge. You can often see error bars in public
opinion polls...Imagine a society in which every speech
in the Congressional Record, every television
commercial, every sermon had an accompanying error bar
or its equivalent."
-"Science and Hope," The
Demon-Haunted World, p. 28.
ON HUMANS AND ANIMALS:
"We must stop pretending we're
something we are not. Somewhere between romantic,
uncritical anthropomorphizing of the animals and an
anxious, obdurate refusal to recognize our kinship with
them - the latter made tellingly clear in the
still-widespread notion of 'special' creation - there is
a broad middle ground on which we humans can take our
stand."
-"Shadows of Forgotten
Ancestors," Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, p.
413.
ON VELIKOVSKY:
"In the entire Velikovsky affair,
the only aspect worse than the shoddy, ignorant and
doctrinaire approach of Velikovsky and many of his
supporters was the disgraceful attempt by some who
called themselves scientists to suppress his writings.
For this, the entire scientific enterprise has suffered.
Velikovsky makes no serious claim of objectivity or
falsifiability. There is at least nothing hypocritical
in his rigid rejection of the immense body of data that
contradicts his arguments. But scientists are supposed
to know better, to realize that ideas will be judged on
their merits if we permit free inquiry and vigorous
debate."
-"Venus and Dr. Velikovsky,"
Broca's Brain, p. 127
BIOLOGY AND HISTORY:
"Biology is much more like
language and history than it is like physics and
chemistry. ...Now you might say that where the subject
is simple, as in physics, we can figure out the
underlying laws and apply them everywhere in the
Universe; but where the subject is difficult, as in
language, history, and biology, governing laws of Nature
may well exist, but our intelligence may be too feeble
to recognize their presence - especially if what is
being studied is complex and chaotic, exquisitely
sensitive to remote and inaccessible initial conditions.
And so we invent formulations about "contingent
reality" to disguise our ignorance. There may well
be some truth to this point of view, but it is nothing
like the whole truth, because history and biology
remember in a way that physics does not. Humans share a
culture, recall and act on what they've been taught.
Life reproduced the adaptations of previous generations,
and retains functioning DNA sequences that reach
billions of years back into the past. We understand
enough about biology and history to recognize a powerful
stochastic component, the accidents preserved by
high-fidelity reproduction."
-"Life is Just a Three-Letter
Word," Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, p. 92.
ON GOD:
"Because the word 'God' means
many things to many people, I frequently reply [to
people who ask 'Do you believe in God?'] by asking what
the questioner means by 'God.' To my surprise, this
response is often considered puzzling or unexpected:
'Oh, you know, God. Everyone knows who God is.' Or
'Well, kind of a force that is stronger than we are and
that exists everywhere in the universe.' There are a
number of such forces. One of them is called gravity,
but it is not often identified with God. And not
everyone does know what is meant by 'God.'...Whether we
believe in God depends very much on what we mean by God.
My deeply held belief is that if a god
of anything like the traditional sort exists, our
curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god.
We would be unappreciative of those gifts (as well as
unable to take such a course of action) if we suppressed
our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On
the other hand, if such a traditional god does not
exist, our curiosity and our intelligence are the
essential tools for managing our survival. In either
case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent with
both science and religion, and is essential for the
welfare of the human species."
-"A Sunday Sermon,"
Broca's Brain, p. 291.
ON THEISM AND ATHEISM:
"Those who raise questions about
the God hypothesis and the soul hypothesis are by no
means all atheists. An atheist is someone who is certain
that God does not exist, someone who has compelling
evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such
compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to
remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would
have to know a great deal more about the universe than
we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be
certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the
nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident
extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and
uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.
A wide range of intermediate positions seems admissible,
and considering the enormous emotional energies with
which the subject is invested, a questioning, courageous
and open mind seems to be the essential tool for
narrowing the range of our collective ignorance on the
subject of the existence of God."
-"The Amniotic Universe,"
Broca's Brain, p. 311.
ON A PLEA FOR TOLERANCE:
"We have held the peculiar notion
that a person or society that is a little different from
us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be
distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative
connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet
the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations
merely represent different ways of being human. An
extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences
among human beings and their societies, would find those
differences trivial compared to the similarities. The
Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings.
But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no
humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet.
We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every
one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a
human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred
billion galaxies, you will not find another."
-"Who Speaks for Earth?,"
Cosmos, p. 339.
ON THE TRANSIENCE OF LIFE:
"Each of us is a tiny being,
permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the
smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local
star. ...The longest-lived organisms on Earth endure for
about a millionth of the age of our planet. A bacterium
lives for one hundred-trillionth of that time. So of
course the individual organisms see nothing of the
overall pattern-continents, climate, evolution. They
barely set foot on the world stage and are promptly
snuffed out-yesterday a drop of semen, as the Roman
Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, tomorrow a handful of
ashes. If the Earth were as old as a person, a typical
organism would be born, live, and die in a sliver of a
second. We are fleeting, transitional creatures,
snowflakes fallen on the hearth fire. That we understand
even a little of our origins is one of the great
triumphs of human insight and courage."
-"Snowflakes Fallen on the
Hearth," Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, pp.
30-31.
ON LIFE AND DEATH:
"Most people would rather be
alive than dead. But why? It's hard to give a coherent
answer. An enigmatic "will to live" or
"life force" is often cited. But what does
that explain? Even victims of atrocious brutality and
intractable pain may retain a longing, sometimes even a
zest, for life. Why, in the cosmic scheme of things, one
individual should be alive and not another is a
difficult question, an impossible question, perhaps even
a meaningless question. Life is a gift that, of the
immense number of possible but unrealized beings, only
the tiniest fraction are privileged to experience.
Except in the most hopeless of circumstances, hardly
anyone is willing to give it up voluntarily - at least
until very old age is reached."
-"What Thin
Partitions...," Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,
p. 159.
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