Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [137]
*Cf. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (New York: Random House, 1992).
CHAPTER 22
TIPTOEING THROUGH THE MILKY WAY
I swear by the shelters of the stars (a mighty oath, if you but knew it) …
—THE QUR’AN, SURA 56 (7TH CENTURY)
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
To give up customs one barely had time to learn …
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, “THE FIRST ELEGY” (1923)
The prospect of scaling heaven, of ascending to the sky, of altering other worlds to suit our purposes—no matter how well intentioned we may be—sets the warning flags flying: We remember the human inclination toward overweening pride; we recall our fallibility and misjudgments when presented with powerful new technologies. We recollect the story of the Tower of Babel, a building “whose top may reach unto heaven,” and God’s fear about our species, that now “nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.”
We come upon Psalm 15, which stakes a divine claim to other worlds: “[T]he heavens are the Lord’s, but the Earth hath he given to the children of men.” Or Plato’s retelling of the Greek analogue of Babel—the tale of Otys and Ephialtes. They were mortals who “dared to scale heaven.” The gods were faced with a choice. Should they kill the upstart humans “and annihilate [their] race with thunderbolts”? On the one hand, “this would be the end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered” the gods and which gods craved. “But, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer [such] insolence to be unrestrained.”
If, in the long term, though, we have no alternative, if our choice really is many worlds or none, we are in need of other sorts of myth, myths of encouragement. They exist. Many religions, from Hinduism to Gnostic Christianity to Mormon doctrine, teach that—as impious as it may sound—it is the goal of humans to become gods. Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In the Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a “glorious” experiment—“completing the Creation.”
The burden of such a responsibility is heavy, especially on so weak and imperfect a species as ours, one with so unhappy a history. Nothing remotely like “completion” can be attempted without vastly more knowledge than we have today. But perhaps, if our very existence is at stake, we will find ourselves able to rise to this supreme challenge.
ALTHOUGH HE DID NOT quite use any of the arguments of the preceding chapter, it was Robert Goddard’s intuition that “the navigation of interplanetary space must be effected to ensure the continuance of the race.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky made a similar judgment:
There are countless planets, like many island Earths … Man occupies one of them. But why could he not avail himself of others, and of the might of numberless suns?… When the Sun has exhausted its energy, it would be logical to leave it and look for another, newly kindled, star still in its prime.
This might be done earlier, he suggested, long before the Sun dies, “by adventurous souls seeking fresh worlds to conquer.”
But as I rethink this whole argument, I’m troubled. Is it too much Buck Rogers? Does it demand an absurd confidence in future technology? Does it ignore my own admonitions about human fallibility? Surely in the short term it’s biased against technologically less-developed nations. Are there no practical alternatives that avoid these pitfalls?
All our self-inflicted environmental problems, all our weapons of mass destruction are products of science and technology. So, you might say, let