by Carl Sagan
Nor can I imagine that the United States, after taking a sober look at this idea, would turn over the security of the country to this mad scheme. A system that has to work perfectly to protect the country and which can never be tested. Trust us. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it.
Questioner: Can religious beliefs adapt to the future?
CS: Well, it's certainly an important question. My feeling is, it depends on what religion is about. If religion is about saying how the natural world is, then to be successful it must adopt the methods, procedures, techniques of science and then become indistinguishable from science. By no means does it follow that that's all that religion is about. And I tried to indicate at the end of my last lecture some of the many areas in which religion could provide a useful role in contemporary society and where religions, by and large, are not. But that's very different from saying how the world is or came to be. And there the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions have simply adopted the best science of the time. But it was a long time ago, the time of sixth-century B.C., during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. That's where the science of the Old Testament comes from. And it seems to me important that the religions accommodate to what has been learned in the twenty-six centuries since. Some have, of course, to varying degrees; many have not.
Questioner: [inaudible]
CS: The god that Einstein was talking about is completely different, as I've tried to say several times in these lectures, from the standard Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. It is not a god who intervenes in everyday life, no microintervention, no prayer. It's not even clear that this god made the universe in the first place. So that's a very different use of the word "god" than what is, I gather, your attempt to justify the existing religion. That we have to use our sense organs and our intellectual abilities to comprehend these issues, I think, is apparent. Perhaps they are limited, but it's all we have. So do the best with what we have. Don't foist, I say, our predispositions on the universe. Look openly at the universe and see how it is. And how is it? It is that there's order in there. It's an amazing amount of order, not that we have introduced but that is there already. Now, you may choose to conclude from that fact that there is an ordering principle and that God exists, and then we come back to all the other arguments: Where did the ordering principle come from? Where did God come from? If you say that I must not ask the question of where God came from, then why must I ask the question of where the universe came from? And so on.
Questioner: Professor Sagan, I'd like advice, please. Is there anything you think an individual could do to change in some way the world situation, or should we just sit back and accept it?
CS: Nope, you don't have to sit back. I think if we let the governments do it, we will continue in the very desultory direction we have already been going for forty years or more. I think the first thing, in a democracy, where there is at least some pretense about the people controlling government policy, is that every democratic process ought to be used. You can make sure that those whom you vote for have rational views on these matters. You can work hard to make sure that there is a real difference of opinion in the alternative candidates. You can write letters to newspapers and so on. But more important than any of that, I believe, is that each of us must equip him- or herself with a "baloney-detection kit."
That is, the governments like to tell us that everything is fine, they have everything under control, and leave them alone. And many of us, especially on issues that involve technology, such as nuclear war, have the sense that it's too complicated. We can't figure it out. The governments have the experts. Surely they know what they're doing. They must be in favor of the support of our country, whichever our country happens to be. And anyway, this is such a painful issue that I want to put it out of my mind, which psychiatrists call denial. And it seems to me that that is a prescription for suicide, that we must, all of us, understand these issues, because our lives depend on them, and the lives of our children and our grandchildren. That's not an issue you want to take on faith. If ever there was a circumstance in which the democratic process ought to take hold, this is it. Something that determines our future and all that we hold dear. And therefore I would say that the first thing to do is to realize that governments, all governments, at least on occasion, lie. And some of them do it all the time-some of them do it only every second statement-but, by and large, governments distort the facts in order to remain in office.
And if we are ignorant of what the issues are and can't even ask the critical questions, then we're not going to make much of a difference. If we can understand the issues, if we can pose the right questions, if we can point out the contradictions, then we can make some progress. There are many other things that can be done, but it seems to me that those two, the baloney-detection kit and use of the democratic process where available, are at least the first two things to consider.
Questioner: [inaudible]
CS: Right. You say everyone in this room has felt aggression. Surely that's right. I'm sure it's right. There may be a few saints in the room… and I very much hope that there are. But at least almost everyone in the room must have felt it. But I also maintain that everyone in the room has felt compassion. Everyone in the room has felt love. Everyone in the room has felt kindness. And so we have two warring principles in the human heart, both of which must have evolved by natural selection, and it's not hard to understand the selective advantage of both of them. And so the issue has to do with which is in the preponderance. And here it is the use of our intellect that is central. Because we're talking about adjudicating between conflicting emotions. And you can't have an adjudication between emotions by an emotion. It must be done by our perceptive intellectual ability. And this is the place where Einstein said something very perceptive. In response-this is post-nuclear war, post-1945-in response to precisely the question you have just formulated, in which Einstein was saying that we must give the dominance to our compassionate side, he said, "What is the alternative?" That is, if we do not, if we cannot manage it, it is clear that we are gone. We're doomed. And therefore we have no alternative. Certainly untrammeled, continuing aggression in an age of nuclear weapons is a prescription for disaster. So either get rid of the nuclear weapons or change what passes for social relations among humans.
But even getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether will not solve this problem. There will be new technical advances. And already there are chemical and biological weapons that could perhaps rival some of the effects of nuclear war. So this is a very key aspect of what I was thinking when I said we are at a branch point in our history, in the sense of who we are. I maintain it's not a question of sudden change, that we have been compassionate for a million years, and it's a question of which part of the human psyche the governments-and the media, and the churches, and the schools-give precedence to. Which one do they teach?
Which one do they encourage? And all I'm saying is that it is within our capability to survive. I don't guarantee it. Prophecy is a lost art. And I don't know what the probabilities are that we will go one way or another. And no one says it's easy. But it is clear, as Einstein said, that if we do not make a change in our way of thinking, all is lost.
Acknowledgments
Editing these lectures afforded me, for precious moments at a time, the happy delusion that I was working with Carl once again. The words he spoke in these lectures would sound in my head and it felt wonderfully as if we had somehow been transported back to the two heavenly decades when we thought and wrote together.
We had the pleasure of writing several of our projects, the Cosmos television series among them, with the astronomer Steven Soter, our dear friend. Since Carl's death Steve and I wrote the first two planetarium shows for the magnificent Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Once I had turned Carl's Gifford Lectures into a book, I invited Steve to join me in editing the final drafts. We felt sure that Carl would not have wanted us to use the 1985 slides from the lectures. Astronomers
have seen farther and more clearly since then. Steve found the gorgeous images that replace them. He also wrote the scientific updates that appear in the footnotes. I am grateful to him for his many editorial contributions to this book.
Ann Godoff has been our editor ever since Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl's favorite among all the books he and we ever wrote. She also edited Carl's Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World, and Billions & Billions. It was her recognition that the Gifford Lectures should become a book that made The Varieties of Scientific Experience possible. Her imagination and wit made the process of that transformation a pleasure. I thank her colleagues at the Penguin Press, art director Claire Vaccaro, and Ann's assistant Liza Darnton for all they did for the book and for me. I am grateful to Maureen Sugden for her meticulous and thoughtful copyediting.
Jonathan Cott has always been a North Star to me, guiding me to every possible kind of great cultural experience. I am further indebted to him for the valuable editorial comments and suggestions he gave me for this book.
I thank Sloan Harris of ICM, for his excellent representation and his consistent commitment to my work, and Katharine Cluverius, in his office, for her kind assistance.
Kristin Albro and Pam Abbey in my office at Cosmos Studios have provided valuable administrative support, and Janet Rice helped in a host of ways, making it possible for me to focus on this work.
I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and loving kindness of Harry Druyan, Cari Sagan Greene, Les Druyan and Viky Rojas-Druyan, Nick and Clinnette Minnis Sagan, Sasha Sagan, Sam Sagan, Kathy Crane-Trentalancia, and Nancy Palmer.
Carl's Gifford Lectures were expertly transcribed from audiotapes long ago by Shirley Arden, his executive assistant at the time. As I read the transcripts, which were done without the text-processing magic of today's computer technology I felt a renewed sense of respect for her consistently meticulous work.
I would also like to thank the organizers of the Gifford Lectures and the University of Glasgow for their kind invitation to Carl and their hospitality to us during our time in Scotland.
In the ten years since Carl's death, these lectures sat in one of the thousand drawers of his vast archives. For some reason the Gifford Lectures were never logged into the archives' otherwise reliably comprehensive index. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic of extreme fundamentalist violence and during a time in the United States when phony piety in public life reached a new low and the critical separation of church and state and public classroom were dangerously eroded, I felt that Carl's perspective on these questions was needed more than ever. I searched in vain for the transcripts. Our friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, succeeded where I had failed. My gratitude to him for this, and much else, is profound.
• Ann Druyan Ithaca, New York March 21, 2006
Figure Captions
Jacket
A 2004 image of Comet NEAT made by the Gunma Observatory of Japan. Every little red/green/blue dash is the spectral trace of a star.
Frontispiece: Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
In 2004 the Hubble Space Telescope looked at a small piece of sky (a tenth the size of the full Moon) for eleven days to make this image of nearly ten thousand galaxies. Light from the most distant galaxies took almost thirteen billion years to travel the distance to Hubble's lens. Each galaxy contains many billions of stars, each star a potential sun to perhaps a dozen worlds.
Science lifts the curtain on a tiny piece of night and finds ten thousand galaxies hidden there. How many stories, how many ways of being in the universe are contained therein? All residing in what, to us, had been just a little patch of empty sky.
Figure 1. Eagle Nebula
A stellar nursery located about 6,500 light-years away from us. Through a window in a dark enveloping shell of interstellar dust, we see a cluster of brilliant newborn stars. Their intense blue light has sculpted filaments and walls of gas and dust, clearing and illuminating a cavity in a cloud about 20 light-years across.
Figure 2. Crab Nebula
This is the remnant of the same exploded star, or supernova, that Chinese and Native American Anasazi astronomers observed in the constellation Taurus in A.D. 1054. They recorded the sudden appearance of a brilliant new star that then slowly faded from view. The filaments are the unraveling debris of the star, enriched in heavy elements produced by the explosion.
Figure 3. Sun and Planets
Here in their order and relative sizes are the Sun (at left), the four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), the four gas giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune), and Pluto (far right).
Figure 4. Wright Solar System and Sirius
The top shows to scale the Sun (left) and the orbit of Mercury (right). The middle shows the entire solar system with the orbit of Saturn (S) and several elliptical comet orbits (left) and the system of the bright star Sirius (right). The bottom shows from left to right the orbits of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury, and the Sun.
Figure 5. Solar System Scales
Upper left The orbits of the inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, the asteroid belt, and the orbit of Jupiter.
Upper right: The scale increases tenfold to encompass the larger orbits of all the gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and the elliptical orbit of Pluto.
Lower right: A further scale change compresses the orbits of all the planets into the box at one end of the highly elliptical orbit of a comet.
Lower left: The scale increases again so that the cometary orbit is now in the tiny box at the center and we see the inner portion of the Oort Cloud of comets.
Figure 6. Oort Cloud
Schematic view shows the vast spherical cloud of perhaps a trillion comets, weakly bound by the gravity of the Sun (center). It was named after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who correctly hypothesized its existence in 1950.
Figure 7. Wright: Other Systems
Wright imagined that our own solar system was but one of a countless number of similar systems in the Milky Way, each perhaps containing a star surrounded by its own retinue of planets and comets.
Figure 8. The Pleiades Star Cluster
The bright stars in this cluster illuminate the faint remnants of the interstellar cloud from which they formed. This star cluster, a naked eye object in the constellation Taurus, is about 15 light-years across.
Figure 9. Orion Nebula
A vast cloud of glowing interstellar gas and opaque dust, which is giving birth to dozens of new stars. The nebula is about 40 light-years across and 1,500 light-years away. If you look up at the constellation Orion on a winter night, this stellar nursery appears as the hazy central "star" in his sword.
Figure 10. Eskimo Nebula
Ten thousand years ago this halo of gas and dust was part of the central star. The aging star then expelled its outer layers into space in successive bursts, forming what astronomers call a planetary nebula. All ordinary stars like the Sun will eventually meet a similar fate.
Figure 11. Veil Nebula
These glowing filaments trace a portion of the expanding remnants of a supernova, a star that exploded about five thousand years ago in the constellation Cygnus.
Figure 12. Sagittarius Star Cloud
A relatively crowded region of old stars in the direction of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Figure 13. Andromeda Galaxy, M31
This large spiral galaxy is only about 2 million light-years away, making it the closest one to our own Milky Way. The flattened rotating disk of stars and clouds of gas and dust is about 200,000 light-years across and contains several hundred billion solar systems.
Figure 14. Hercules Cluster
Most of the objects in this image are entire galaxies, like our own Milky Way, each containing many billions of stars. Many of the galaxies of the Hercules Cluster are interacting, with some of them actually colliding and merging. This rich cluster is about 650 million light-years away.
Figure 15. Saturn Wide Shot
Figure 16. Close-up of Saturn's Rings
In this back-lit image from the Cassini spacecraft, the Sun illuminates Saturn's rings from behind, revealing the fine structure of multiple thin rings.
Figure 17. Solar Nebula
A chaotic cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapses under its own gravity (A). Most of the mass falls to the center to form and ignite the Sun, but the residual spin of the cloud prevents it from collapsing in one direction, resulting in a flat rotating disk (B). The particles in the disk coagulate to form larger objects, and the largest ones sweep out clear lanes from the debris disk (C). This process continues as the colliding particles become larger and fewer (D), eventually leaving the solar system in its present form (E).