Cosmos - Carl Sagan [168]
*Fourier is now famous for his study of the propagation of heat in solids, used today to understand the surface properties of the planets, and for his investigation of waves and other periodic motion—a branch of mathematics known as Fourier analysis.
*When La Pérouse was mustering the ship’s company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned down. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Pérouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found. Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have been changed significantly.
*The account of Cowee, the Tlingit chief, shows that even in a preliterate culture a recognizable account of contact with an advanced civilization can be preserved for generations. If the Earth had been visited hundreds of thousands of years ago by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, even if the contacted culture was preliterate, we might well expect to have some recognizable form of the encounter preserved. But there is not a single case in which a legend reliably dated from earlier pretechnological times can be understood only in terms of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.
*There may be many motivations to go to the stars. If our Sun or a nearby star were about to go supernova, a major program of interstellar spaceflight might suddenly become attractive. If we were very advanced, the discovery that the galactic core was imminently to explode might even generate serious interest in transgalactic or intergalactic spaceflight. Such cosmic violence occurs sufficiently often that nomadic spacefaring civilizations may not be uncommon. Even so, their arrival here remains unlikely.
*Or other national organs. Consider this pronouncement from a British Defence Department spokesman as reported in the London Observer for February 26, 1978: “Any messages transmitted from outer space are the responsibility of the BBC and the Post Office. It is their responsibility to track down illegal broadcasts.”
CHAPTER XIII
WHO SPEAKS FOR EARTH?
To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?
—A question put to Pythagoras by Anaximenes (c. 600 B.C.),
according to Montaigne
How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.
—Christiaan Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary
Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, c. 1690
We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries … It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening … Out of our … lineage, minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves.