Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [16]
In popular culture, the very opposite position is also embraced, although it too is driven by human chauvinism (plus a failure of the imagination): Children’s stories and cartoons make animals dress in clothes, live in houses, use knives and forks, and speak. The three bears sleep in beds. The owl and the pussycat go to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. Dinosaur mothers cuddle their young. Pelicans deliver the mail. Dogs drive cars. A worm catches a thief. Pets have human names. Dolls, nutcrackers, cups, and saucers dance and have opinions. The dish runs away with the spoon. In the Thomas the Tank Engine series, we even have anthropomorphic locomotives and railway cars, charmingly portrayed. No matter what we’re thinking about, animate or inanimate, we tend to invest it with human traits. We can’t help ourselves. The images come readily to mind. Children are clearly fond of them.
When we talk about a “threatening” sky, a “troubled” sea, diamonds “resisting” being scratched, the Earth “attracting” a passing asteroid, or an atom being “excited,” we are again drawn to a kind of animist worldview. We reify. Some ancient level of our thinking endows inanimate Nature with life, passions, and forethought.
The notion that the Earth is self-aware has lately been growing at the fringes of the “Gaia” hypothesis. But, this was a commonplace belief of both the ancient Greeks and the early Christians. Origen wondered whether “the earth also, according to its own nature, is accountable for some sin.” A host of ancient scholars thought the stars alive. This was also the position of Origen, of St. Ambrose (the mentor of St. Augustine), and even, in a more qualified form, of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Stoic philosophical position on the Sun’s nature was stated by Cicero, in the first century B.C.: “Since the Sun resembles those fires which are contained in the bodies of living creatures, the Sun must also be alive.”
Animist attitudes in general seem to have been spreading recently. In a 1954 American survey, 75 percent of people polled were willing to state that the Sun is not alive; in 1989, only 30 percent would support so rash a proposition. On whether an automobile tire can feel anything, 90 percent of respondents denied it emotions in 1954, but only 73 percent in 1989.
We can recognize here a shortcoming—in some circumstances serious—in our ability to understand the world. Characteristically, willy-nilly, we seem compelled to project our own nature onto Nature. Although this may result in a consistently distorted view of the world, it does have one great virtue—projection is the essential precondition for compassion.
Okay, maybe we’re not much, maybe we’re humiliatingly related to apes, but at least we’re the best there is. God and angels aside, we’re the only intelligent beings in the Universe. One correspondent writes to me, “I am as sure of this as anything in my experience. There is no conscious life anywhere else in the Universe. Mankind thus returns to its rightful position as center of the Universe.” However, partly through the influence of science and science fiction, most people today, in the United States at least, reject this proposition—for reasons essentially stated by the ancient Greek philosopher Chrysippus: “For any human being in existence to think that there is nothing in the whole world superior to himself would be an insane piece of arrogance.”
But the simple fact is that we have not yet found extraterrestrial life. We are in the earliest stages of looking. The question