Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [125]
I think the experience of living on other worlds is bound to change us. Our descendants, born and raised elsewhere, will naturally begin to owe primary loyalty to the worlds of their birth, whatever affection they retain for the Earth. Their physical needs, their methods of supplying those needs, their technologies, and their social structures will all have to be different.
A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being? The American revolutionary Tom Paine, in describing his contemporaries, had thoughts along these lines:
The wants which necessarily accompany the cultivation of a wilderness produced among them a state of society which countries long harassed by the quarrels and intrigues of governments had neglected to cherish. In such a situation man becomes what he ought to be. He sees his species … as kindred.
Having seen at first hand a procession of barren and desolate worlds, it will be natural for our spacefaring descendants to cherish life. Having learned something from the tenure of our species on Earth, they may wish to apply those lessons to other worlds—to spare generations to come the avoidable suffering that their ancestors were obliged to endure, and to draw upon our experience and our mistakes as we begin our open-ended evolution into space.
*In the real world, Chinese space officials are proposing to send a two-person astronaut capsule into orbit by the turn of the century. It would be propelled by a modified Long March 2E rocket and be launched from the Gobi Desert. If the Chinese economy exhibits even moderate continuing growth—much less the exponential growth that marked it in the early to mid-1990s—China may be one of the world’s leading space powers by the middle of the twenty-first century. Or earlier.
*If it had been the other way, then we and everything else in this part of the Universe would be made of anti-matter. We would, of course, call it matter—and the idea of worlds and life made of that other kind of material, the stuff with the electrical charges reversed, we’d consider wildly speculative.
*Williamson, Professor Emeritus of English at Eastern New Mexico University, at age 85 wrote to me that he was “amazed to see how far actual science has come” since he first suggested terraforming other worlds. We are accumulating the technology that will one day permit terraforming, but at present all we have are suggestions by and large less ground breaking than Williamson’s original ideas.
CHAPTER 20
DARKNESS
Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight, there are watchers in the skies.
—EURIPIDES, THE BACCHAE (CA. 406 B.C.)
As children, we fear the dark. Anything might be out. there. The unknown troubles us.
Ironically, it is our fate to live in the dark. This unexpected finding of science is only about three centuries old. Head out from the Earth in any direction you choose, and—after an initial flash of blue and a longer wait while the Sun fades—you are surrounded by blackness, punctuated only here and there by the faint and distant stars.
Even after we are grown, the darkness retains its power to frighten us. And so there are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better not to know, they say.
There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Of this immense multitude, could it be that our humdrum Sun is the only one with an inhabited planet? Maybe. Maybe the origin of life or intelligence is exceedingly improbable. Or maybe civilizations arise all the time, but wipe themselves out as soon as they are able.
Or, here and there, peppered across space, orbiting other suns, maybe there are worlds something like our own, on which other beings gaze up and wonder as we do about who else lives in the dark. Could