Cosmos - Carl Sagan [104]
Since Aristarchus, every step in our quest has moved us farther from center stage in the cosmic drama. There has not been much time to assimilate these new findings. The discoveries of Shapley and Hubble were made within the lifetimes of many people still alive today. There are those who secretly deplore these great discoveries, who consider every step a demotion, who in their heart of hearts still pine for a universe whose center, focus and fulcrum is the Earth. But if we are to deal with the Cosmos we must first understand it, even if our hopes for some unearned preferential status are, in the process, contravened. Understanding where we live is an essential precondition for improving the neighborhood. Knowing what other neighborhoods are like also helps. If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
We embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
*This sense of fire as a living thing, to be protected and cared for, should not be dismissed as a “primitive” notion. It is to be found near the root of many modern civilizations. Every home in ancient Greece and Rome and among the Brahmans of ancient India had a hearth and a set of prescribed rules for caring for the flame. At night the coals were covered with ashes for insulation; in the morning twigs were added to revive the flame. The death of the flame in the hearth was considered synonymous with the death of the family. In all three cultures, the hearth ritual was connected with the worship of ancestors. This is the origin of the eternal flame, a symbol still widely employed in religious, memorial, political and athletic ceremonials throughout the world.
*The exclamation point is a click, made by touching the tongue against the inside of the incisors, and simultaneously pronouncing the K.
*As an aid to confusion, Ionia is not in the Ionian Sea; it was named by colonists from the coast of the Ionian Sea.
*There is some evidence that the antecedent, early Sumerian creation myths were largely naturalistic explanations, later codified around 1000 B.C. in the Enuma elish (“When on high,” the first words of the poem); but by then the gods had replaced Nature, and the myths offers a theogony, not a cosmogony. The Enuma elish is reminiscent of the Japanese and Ainu myths in which an originally muddy cosmos is beaten by the wings of a bird, separating the land from the water. A Fijian creation myth says: “Rokomautu created the land. He scooped it up out of the bottom of the ocean in great handfuls and accumulated it in piles here and there. These are the Fiji Islands.” The distillation of land from water is a natural enough idea for island and seafaring peoples.
*And astrology, which was then widely regarded as a science. In a typical passage, Hippocrates writes: “One must also guard against the risings of the stars, especially of the Dog Star [Sirius], then of Arcturus, and also of the setting of the Pleiades.”
†The experiment was performed in support of a totally erroneous theory of the circulation of the blood, but the idea of performing any experiment to probe Nature is the important innovation.
*The frontiers of the calculus were also later breached by Eudoxus and Archimedes.
*The sixth century B.C. was a time of remarkable intellectual and spiritual ferment across the planet. Not only was it the time of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of Zoroaster