Cosmos - Carl Sagan [182]
The cost of major ventures into space—permanent bases on the Moon or human exploration of Mars, say—is so large that they will not, I think, be mustered in the very near future unless we make dramatic progress in nuclear and “conventional” disarmament. Even then there are probably more pressing needs here on Earth. But I have no doubt that, if we avoid self-destruction, we will sooner or later perform such missions. It is almost impossible to maintain a static society. There is a kind of psychological compound interest: even a small tendency toward retrenchment, a turning away from the Cosmos, adds up over many generations to a significant decline. And conversely, even a slight commitment to ventures beyond the Earth—to what we might call, after Columbus, “the enterprise of the stars”—builds over many generations to a significant human presence on other worlds, a rejoicing in our participation in the Cosmos.
Some 3.6 million years ago, in what is now northern Tanzania, a volcano erupted, the resulting cloud of ash covering the surrounding savannahs. In 1979, the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found in that ash footprints—the footprints, she believes, of an early hominid, perhaps an ancestor of all the people on the Earth today. And 380,000 kilometers away, in a flat dry plain that humans have in a moment of optimism called the Sea of Tranquility, there is another footprint, left by the first human to walk another world. We have come far in 3.6 million years, and in 4.6 billion and in 15 billion.
For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
*The process is similar to, but much more dangerous than, the destruction of the ozone layer by the fluorocarbon propellants in aerosol spray cans, which have accordingly been banned by a number of nations; and to that invoked in the explanation of the extinction of the dinosaurs by a supernova explosion a few dozen light-years away.
*The word cosmopolitan was first invented by Diogenes, the rationalist philosopher and critic of Plato.
*With the single exception of Archimedes, who during his stay at the Alexandrian Library invented the water screw, which is used in Egypt to this day for the irrigation of cultivated fields. But even he considered such mechanical contrivances far beneath the dignity of science.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Besides those thanked in the introduction, I am very grateful to the many people who generously contributed their time and expertise to this book, including Carol Lane, Myrna Talman, and Jenny Arden; David Oyster, Richard Wells, Tom Weidlinger, Dennis Gutierrez, Rob McCain, Nancy Kinney, Janelle Balnicke, Judy Flannery, and Susan Racho of the Cosmos television staff; Nancy Inglis, Peter Mollman, Marylea O’Reilly, and Jennifer Peters of Random House; Paul west for generously lending me the title of Chapter 5; and George Abell, James Allen, Barbara Amago, Lawrence Anderson, Jonathon Arons, Halton Arp, Asma El Bakri, James Blinn, Bart Bok, Zeddie Bowen, John C. Brandt, Kenneth Brecher, Frank Bristow, John Callendar, Donald B. Campbell, Judith Campbell, Elof Axel Carlson, Michael Carra, John Cassani, Judith Castagno, Catherine Cesarsky, Martin Cohen, Judy-Lynn del Rey, Nicholas Devereux, Michael Devirian, Stephen Dole, Frank D. Drake, Frederick C. Durant III, Richard Epstein, Von R. Eshleman, Ahmed Fahmy, Herbert Friedman, Robert Frosch, Jon Fukuda, Richard Gammon, Ricardo Giacconi, Thomas Gold, Paul Goldenberg, Peter