Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [46]
There are too many loopholes, too many alternative explanations for such a myth to provide reliable evidence of past extraterrestrial contact. If there are extraterrestrials, I think it much more likely that unmanned planetary spacecraft and large radiotelescopes will prove to be the means of their detection.
* 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).
* 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.
CHAPTER 7
VENUS AND
DR. VELIKOVSKY
When the movement of the comets is considered and we reflect on the laws of gravity, it will be readily perceived that their approach to the Earth might there cause the most woeful events, bring back the universal deluge, or make it perish in a deluge of fire, shatter it into small dust, or at least turn it from its orbit, drive away its Moon, or, still worse, the Earth itself outside the orbit of Saturn, and inflict upon us a winter several centuries long, which neither men nor animals would be able to bear. The tails even of comets would not be unimportant phenomena, if the comets in taking their departure left them in whole or in part in our atmosphere.
J. H. LAMBERT,
Cosmologische Briefe über
die Einrichtung des Weltbaues (1761)
However dangerous might be the shock of a comet, it might be so slight, that it would only do damage at the part of the Earth where it actually struck; perhaps even we might cry quits if while one kingdom were devastated, the rest of the Earth were to enjoy the rarities which a body which came from so far might bring to it. Perhaps we should be very surprised to find that the debris of these masses that we despised were formed of gold and diamonds; but who would be the most astonished, we, or the comet-dwellers, who would be cast on our Earth? What strange beings each would find the other!
MAUPERTUIS,
Lettre sur la comète (1752)
SCIENTISTS, like other human beings, have their hopes and fears, their passions and despondencies—and their strong emotions may sometimes interrupt the course of clear thinking and sound practice. But science is also self-correcting. The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged. The prevailing hypotheses must survive confrontation with observation. Appeals to authority are impermissible. The steps in a reasoned argument must be set out for all to see. Experiments must be reproducible.
The history of science is full of cases where previously accepted theories and hypotheses have been entirely overthrown, to be replaced by new ideas that more adequately explain the data. While there is an understandable psychological inertia—usually lasting about one generation—such revolutions in scientific thought are widely accepted as a necessary and desirable element of scientific progress. Indeed, the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property, and sets it off from many other areas of human endeavor where credulity is the rule.
The idea of science as a method rather than as a body of knowledge is not widely appreciated outside of science, or indeed in some corridors inside of science. For this reason I and some of my colleagues