Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [1]
Field Enterprises: “The Climates of Planets” in Science Year 1975. Copyright © 1975 by Field Enterprises Educational Corporation. William Morrow & Company, Inc.: Excerpts from The Planets by Diane Ackerman. Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Diane Ackerman. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow & Company, Inc.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-21810
eISBN: 978-0-307-80099-2
This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
v3.1
To Rachel and Samuel Sagan, my parents,
who introduced me to the joys of understanding
the world, with gratitude and admiration and love
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR DISCUSSION on specific points I am grateful to a number of friends, correspondents and colleagues, including Diane Ackerman, D. W. G. Arthur, James Bakalar, Richard Berendzen, Norman Bloom, C. Chandrasekhar, Clark Chapman, Sidney Coleman, Yves Coppens, Judy-Lynn Del Rey, Frank Drake, Stuart Edelstein, Paul Fox, D. Carleton Gajdusek, Owen Gingerich, Thomas Gold, J. Richard Gott III, Steven J. Gould, Lester Grinspoon, Stanislav Grof, J. U. Gunter, Robert Horvitz, James W. Kalat, B. Gentry Lee, Jack Lewis, Marvin Minsky, David Morrison, Philip Morrison, Bruce Murray, Phileo Nash, Tobias Owen, James Pollack, James Randi, E. E. Salpeter, Stuart Shapiro, Gunther Stent, O. B. Toon, Joseph Veverka, E. A. Whitaker and A. Thomas Young.
This book owes much, in all stages of production, to the dedicated and competent efforts of Susan Lang, Carol Lane, and, particularly, my executive assistant, Shirley Arden.
I am especially grateful to Ann Druyan and Steven Soter for generous encouragement and stimulating commentary on a great many of the subjects of this book. Ann has made essential contributions to most chapters and to the title; my debt to her is very great.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I SCIENCE AND HUMAN CONCERN
1. Broca’s Brain
2. Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a
Grain of Salt
3. That World Which Beckons Like a Liberation
4. In Praise of Science and Technology
II THE PARADOXERS
5. Night Walkers and Mystery Mongers: Sense and
Nonsense at the Edge of Science
6. White Dwarfs and Little Green Men
7. Venus and Dr. Velikovsky
8. Norman Bloom, Messenger of God
9. Science Fiction—A Personal View
III OUR NEIGBORHOOD IN SPACE
10. The Sun’s Family
11. A Planet Named George
12. Life in the Solar System
13. Titan, the Enigmatic Moon of Saturn
14. The Climates of Planets
15. Kalliope and the Kaaba
16. The Golden Age of Planetary Exploration
IV THE FUTURE
17. “Will You Walk a Little Faster?”
18. Via Cherry Tree, to Mars
19. Experiments in Space
20. In Defense of Robots
21. The Past and Future of American Astronomy
22. The Quest for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
V ULTIMATE QUESTIONS
23. A Sunday Sermon
24. Gott and the Turtles
25. The Amniotic Universe
References
INTRODUCTION
WE LIVE in an extraordinary age. These are times of stunning changes in social organization, economic wellbeing, moral and ethical precepts, philosophical and religious perspectives, and human self-knowledge, as well as in our understanding of that vast universe in which we are imbedded like a grain of sand in a cosmic ocean. As long as there have been human beings, we have posed the deep and fundamental questions, which evoke wonder and stir us into at least a tentative and trembling awareness, questions on the origins of consciousness; life on our planet; the beginnings of the Earth; the formation of the Sun; the possibility of intelligent beings somewhere up there in the depths of the sky; as well as, the grandest inquiry of all—on the advent, nature and ultimate destiny of the universe. For all but the last instant of human history these issues have been the exclusive province of philosophers and poets, shamans and theologians. The diverse and mutually contradictory answers offered demonstrate that few