by Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
***
[1] Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry, which requires more than 10 bits of information to understand.
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[2] For example, Lady Wonder, a horse from Virginia, could answer questions by arranging lettered wood blocks with her nose. Since she also replied to queries posed privately to her owner, she was pronounced not only literate but telepathic by the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 23, 449, 1929). The magician John Scarne found the owner would intentionally signal the horse with a whip as Lady Wonder moved her head over the blocks, preparatory to nudging them into words. The owner seemed to be out of the horse’s field of view, but horses have excellent peripheral vision. Unlike Clever Hans, Lady Wonder was an accomplice in an intentional fraud.
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[3] A detailed discussion of the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaque can be found in my book The Cosmic Connection (New York, Doubleday, 1973); and the phonograph records aboard Voyager 1 and 2 are comprehensively described in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (New York, Random House, 1978).
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[4] The ancient Egyptian phrase for the planet Mars translates to “the red Horns,” Horns being the imperial falcon deity. Thus Egyptian astronomy noted remarkable coloration in celestial objects. But the description of Sirius mentions nothing notable about its color.
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[5] Citations to references in this chapter are given at the end of the book.
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[6] The page numbers refer to the canonical English-language edition (Velikovsky, 1950).
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[7] Actually, Exodus states that manna fell each day except on the Sabbath. A double ration, uninfected by worms, fell instead on Friday. This seems awkward for Velikovsky’s hypothesis. How could the comet know? Indeed, this raises a general problem about Velikovsky’s historical method. Some quotations from his religious and historical sources are to be taken literally; others are to be dismissed as “local embellishments.” But what is the standard by which this decision is made? Surely such a standard must involve a criterion independent of our predispositions toward Velikovsky’s contentions.
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[8] The prediction of the relative motions of three objects attracted to each other gravitationally.
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[9] An informative and entertaining discussion of the Thera case, and the whole question of the connection of myth with geological events, can be found in the book by Vitaliano (1973); see also de Camp (1975).
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[10] Kowal has also recently discovered a very interesting small object orbiting the Sun between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn. It may be the largest member of a new asteroid belt. Kowal proposes calling it Chiron, after the centaur who educated many Greek mythological gods and heroes. If other trans-Saturnian asteroids are discovered, they can be named after other centaurs.
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[11] Unexpected discoveries are useful for calibrating pre-existing ideas. G. W. F. Hegel has had a very powerful imprint on professional philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a profound influence on the future of the world because Karl Marx took him very seriously (although sympathetic critics have argued that Marx’s arguments would have been more compelling had he never heard of Hegel). In 1799 or 1800 Hegel confidently stated, using presumably the full armamentarium of philosophy available to him, that no new celestial objects could exist within the solar system. One year later, the asteroid Ceres was discovered. Hegel then seems to have returned to pursuits less amenable to disproof.
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[12] In manned Earth orbital flights, still other problems arise. Consider a religious Muslim or Jew circling the Earth once every ninety minutes. Is he obligated to celebrate the Sabbath every seventh orbit? Spaceflight provides access to environments very different from those in which we and our customs have grown up.
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[13] In a commencement address at Clark University on May 18, 1978, I made some similar remarks. Dorothy Mosakowski in the Rare Book Room at Clark’s Goddard Memorial Library then searched for and found this little essay which had been listed as lost. In it we discover that Goddard was attracted to but cautious about the possibility of life on Mars, certain of the existence of extrasolar planetary systems and deduced “that among these countless planets there are conditions of heat and light equivalent to those we experience; and if this is the case, and the planet is near our age and size, there may very likely exist human beings like ourselves, probably with strange costumes and still stranger manners.” But he also says: “It is for the distant future to answer if we will ever realize truth from our surmises.”
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[14] Although, remarkably, he was in Worcester in the year 1909 when Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung gave the first comprehensive discussion in the English language of those institutionalized insights called psychoanalysis. Many American psychiatrists got their first glimpses of the subject from Freud’s Clark University lectures. One wonders if the middle-aged bearded Viennese physician and the young mustachioed American physics graduate student nodded to each other in passing on the Clark University campus, on their way to their separate destinies.
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[15] With the sole exception of the meteorites (see Chapter 15).
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[16] I have discussed these successful inferences and their spacecraft confirmations in Chapters 12, 16 and 17 of The Cosmic Connection.
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[17] White seems also to have been responsible for the exemplary custom of not awarding honorary doctoral degrees at Cornell University: he was concerned about a potential abuse, that honorary degrees would be traded for financial gifts and bequests. White was a man of strong and courageous ethical standards.
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[18] Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods. It is a curious concept this, of an omnipotent God with a long list of things he is forbidden to do by the fiat of the theologians.
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[19] It is a charming notion that Napoleon actually spent his days aboard ship perusing the highly mathematical Mécanique céleste. But he was seriously interested in science and made an earnest attempt to survey the latest findings (see The Society of Arcueil: A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I by Maurice Crosland, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967). Napoleon did not pretend to read all of the Mécanique céleste and wryly wrote to Laplace on another occasion, “The first six months which I can spare will be employed in reading it.” But he also remarked, on another of Laplace’s books, “Your works contribute to the glory of the nation. The progress and perfection of mathematics are linked closely with the prosperity of the state.”
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[20] However, from astronomical arguments Aristotle concluded that there were several dozen unmoved prime movers in the universe. Aristotelian arguments for a prime mover would seem to have polytheistic consequences that might be considered dangerous by contemporary Western theologians.
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[21] This subject is rich in irony. Augustine was born in Africa in 354 A.D. and in his early years was a Manichean, an adherent of a dualistic view of the universe in which good and evil are in conflict on roughly equal terms, and which was later condemned as a �
��heresy” by Christian orthodoxy. The possibility that all was not right with Manicheanism occurred to Augustine when he was studying its astronomy. He discovered that even the leading figures in the faith could not justify its murky astronomical notions. This contradiction between theology and science on matters astronomical was the initial impetus moving him toward Catholicism, the religion of his mother, which in later centuries persecuted scientists such as Galileo for trying to improve our understanding of astronomy. Augustine later became Saint Augustine, one of the major intellectual figures in the history of the Roman Catholic church, and his mother became Saint Monica, after whom a suburb of Los Angeles is named. Bertrand Russell wondered what Augustine’s view of the conflict between astronomy and theology would have been had he lived in the time of Galileo.
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[22] But there is still a debate on how much deuterium can be made in the hot insides of stars and later spewed back into the interstellar gas. If this is substantial, the present deuterium abundance will have less impact on the density of the early universe.
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[23] It is interesting to wonder why psychedelic molecules exist-especially in great abundance-in a variety of plants. The psychedelics are unlikely to provide any immediate benefit for the plant. The hemp plant probably does not get high from its complement of 1Δ tetrahydrocannabinol. But human beings cultivate hemp because the hallucinogenic properties of marijuana are widely prized. There is evidence that in some cultures psychedelic plants are the only domesticated vegetation. It is possible that in such ethnobotany a symbiotic relationship has developed between the plants and the humans. Those plants which by accident provide desired psychedelics are preferentially cultivated. Such artificial selection can exert an extremely powerful influence on subsequent evolution in relatively short time periods-say, tens of thousands of years-as is apparent by comparing many domesticated animals with their wild forebears. Recent work also makes it likely that psychedelic substances work because they are close chemical congeners of natural substances, produced by the brain, which inhibit or enhance neural transmission, and which may have among their physiological functions the induction of endogenous changes in perception or mood.
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[24] A fascinating description of Grof’s work and the entire range of psychedelics can be found in the forthcoming book Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered by Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (New York, Basic Books, 1979). Grof’s own description of his findings can be found in Realms of the Human Unconscious by S. Grof (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1976) and The Human Encounter with Death by S. Grof and J. Halifax (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1977).
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[25] Astonishingly, oxytocin turns out to be an ergot derivative that is chemically related to psychedelics such as LSD. Since it induces labor, it is at least a plausible hypothesis that some similar natural substance is employed by nature to induce uterine contractions. But this would imply some fundamental connection for the mother-and perhaps for the child-between birth and psychedelic drugs. Perhaps it is therefore not so implausible that, much later in life under the influence of a psychedelic drug, we recall the birth experience-the event during which we first experienced psychedelic drugs.
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[26] A different but not inconsistent hypothesis on the Eden metaphor, in phylogeny rather than ontogeny, is described in The Dragons of Eden.
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[27] One curious variant is given in Arthur Schnitzler’s Flight Into Darkness: “… at all the moments of death of any nature, one lives over again his past life with a rapidity inconceivable to others. This remembered life must also have a last moment, and this last moment its own last moment, and so on, and hence, dying is itself eternity, and hence, in accordance with the theory of limits, one may approach death but can never reach it.” In fact, the sum of an infinite series of this sort is finite, and the argument fails for mathematical as well as other reasons. But it is a useful reminder that we are often willing to accept desperate measures to avoid a serious confrontation with the inevitability of death.
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[28] Kangaroos are born when they are little more than embryos and must then make, entirely unassisted, a heroic journey hand over hand from birth canal to pouch. Many fail this demanding test. Those who succeed find themselves once again in a warm, dark and protective environment, this one equipped with teats. Would the religion of a species of intelligent marsupials invoke a stern and implacable god who severely tests marsupialkind? Would marsupial cosmology deduce a brief interlude of radiation in a premature Big Bang followed by a “Second Dark,” and then a much more placid emergence into the universe we know?
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