There’s hardly an aspect of modern society that doesn’t depend on intelligent decision making in science and technology. We are supposed to be a democracy. The people are supposed to make sure that their representatives vote correctly. How can they do that if they don’t know what the issues are and can’t understand them?”
Carl Sagan “Bringing Science Down to Earth” (Hemispheres 1994)
-Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, Ann Druyan (Editor) (2006)
Science is, at least in part, informed worship.
-Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, Ann Druyan (Editor) (2006)
Carl Sagan ; The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
Carl Sagan ; The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark
-Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)
Carl Sagan ; Cosmos “The Persistence of Memory”
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“Towards the end of the 19th century, Jules Verne wrote a story and account in which he attempted to predict what transportation techniques would be present in about 1950. And the most you can imagine was enormous balloons with elegant gondolas and red velvet crossing the United States from New York to San Francisco in only a period of a few weeks.
Jules Verne was a very daring thinker. Now his problem was he could not imagine heavier than aircraft because they had not been invented. And everyone said they could not be such a thing. What I’m saying is that the technological developments that cannot now be predicted will probably dominate the future in 100 or 200 years from now. And therefore no one is in the position to make a reliable prediction.”
Carl Sagan On Jules Verne & Technological Predictions
(Oasis In Space with Jacques & Philippe Cousteau, 1976)
The secrets of evolution are death and time – the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations that were by accident adaptive, time for the slow accumulation of patterns of favorable mutations. Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
Carl Sagan ; Cosmos
Accidentally useful mutations provide the working material for biological evolution-as, for example, a mutation for melanin in certain moths, which changes their color from white to black. Such moths commonly rest on English birch trees, where their white coloration provides protective camouflage. Under these conditions, the melanin mutation is not an advantage-the dark moths are starkly visible and are eaten by birds; the mutation is selected against. But when the Industrial Revolution began to cover the birch bark with soot, the situation was reversed, and only moths with the melanin mutation survived. Then the mutation is selected for, and, in time, almost all the moths are dark, passing this inheritable change on to future generations. There are still occasional reverse mutations eliminating the melanin adaptation, which would be useful for the moths were English industrial pollution to be controlled. Note that in all this interaction between mutation and natural selection, no moth is making a conscious effort to adapt to a changed environment. The process is random and statistical.
-Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)
-Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)
-Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)
There certainly is a kind of plausibility argument for extraterrestrial life and it goes something like like this:
There’s – we now realize an enormous number of planets, in the last few years – telescopes in Earth orbit and ground based telescopes – have found a range of planetary systems around nearby stars, some in the process of formation as the solar system was four billion years ago or so, others apparently fully fully formed. So there’s a lot of potential abodes for life. That’s one thing. Then there’s the question of organic matter, the the molecules that make us up, the carbon-rich complex molecules that are essential for the kind of life we know about, are fantastically abundant. They litter the universe. We see them in asteroids, and comets, and the moons and the outer solar system, and even in the cool dark spaces between the stars.
So the stuff of life is everywhere. And then there’s time. There are billions of years for biological evolution on all those worlds. There are many worlds that are much older than ours. And so you put those together – lots of places, lots of organic matter, lots of time – and it seems very hard to believe that our paltry little planet is the only one that’s inhabited.”
Carl Sagan (Studs Terkel Radio Interview in 1985 for “Contact”)
#carlsagan #science #extraterrestrial #intelligence
Sagittarius B2 is a giant molecular cloud of gas and dust located about 390 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. The cloud contains vast amounts of complex organic molecules, including methanol, ethanol, and propanol.
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