Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [12]
By the late twentieth century, just in case there were any holdouts, we have been able to settle the matter directly. We’ve been able to test whether we live in an Earth-centered system with planets affixed to transparent crystal spheres, or in a Sun-centered system with planets controlled at a distance by the gravity of the Sun. We have, for example, probed the planets with radar. When we bounce a signal off a moon of Saturn, we receive no radio echo from a nearer crystal sphere attached to Jupiter. Our spacecraft arrive at their appointed destinations with astonishing precision, exactly as predicted by Newtonian gravitation. When our ships fly to Mars, say, their instruments do not hear a tinkling sound or detect shards of broken crystal as they crash through the “spheres” that—according to the authoritative opinions that prevailed for millennia—propel Venus or the Sun in their dutiful motions about the central Earth.
When Voyager 1 scanned the Solar System from beyond the outermost planet, it saw, just as Copernicus and Galileo had said we would, the Sun in the middle and the planets in concentric orbits about it. Far from being the center of the Universe, the Earth is just one of the orbiting dots. No longer confined to a single world, we are now able to reach out to others and determine decisively what kind of planetary system we inhabit.
EVERY OTHER PROPOSAL, and their number is legion, to displace us from cosmic center stage has also been resisted, in part for similar reasons. We seem to crave privilege, merited not by our works but by our birth, by the mere fact that, say, we are humans and born on Earth. We might call it the anthropocentric—the “human-centered”—conceit.
This conceit is brought close to culmination in the notion that we are created in God’s image: The Creator and Ruler of the entire Universe looks just like me. My, what a coincidence! How convenient and satisfying! The sixth-century-B.C. Greek philosopher Xenophanes understood the arrogance of this perspective:
The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair … Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen …
Such attitudes were once described as “provincial”—the naive expectation that the political hierarchies and social conventions of an obscure province extend to a vast empire composed of many different traditions and cultures; that the familiar boondocks, our boondocks, are the center of the world. The country bumpkins know almost nothing about what else is possible. They fail to grasp the insignificance of their province or the diversity of the Empire. With ease, they apply their own standards and customs to the rest of the planet. But plopped down in Vienna, say, or Hamburg, or New York, ruefully they recognize how limited their perspective has been. They become “deprovincialized.”
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
*Copernicus’ famous book was first published with an introduction by the theologian Andrew Osiander, inserted without the knowledge of the dying astronomer. Osiander’s well-meaning attempt to reconcile religion and Copernican astronomy ended with these words: “[L]et no one expect anything in the way of certainty of astronomy, since astronomy can offer us nothing certain, lest, if anyone take as true that which has been constructed for another use, he go away from this discipline a bigger fool than when he came to it.” Certainty could be found only in religion.
CHAPTER 3
THE GREAT DEMOTIONS
[One philosopher] asserted that he knew the whole secret … [H]e surveyed the two celestial strangers from top to toe, and maintained to their faces that their persons, their worlds, their