Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [4]
We have uncovered wonders undreamt by our ancestors who first speculated on the nature of those wandering lights in the night sky. We have probed the origins of our planet and ourselves. By discovering what else is possible, by coming face to face with alternative fates of worlds more or less like our own, we have begun to better understand the Earth. Every one of these worlds is lovely and instructive. But, so far as we know, they are also, every one of them, desolate and barren. Out there, there are no “better places.” So far, at least.
During the Viking robotic mission, beginning in July 1976, in a certain sense I spent a year on Mars. I examined the boulders and sand dunes, the sky red even at high noon, the ancient river valleys, the soaring volcanic mountains, the fierce wind erosion, the laminated polar terrain, the two dark potato-shaped moons. But there was no life—not a cricket or a blade of grass, or even, so far as we can tell for sure, a microbe. These worlds have not been graced, as ours has, by life. Life is a comparative rarity. You can survey dozens of worlds and find that on only one of them does life arise and evolve and persist.
Having in all their lives till then crossed nothing wider than a river, Leib and Chaiya graduated to crossing oceans. They had one great advantage: On the other side of the waters there would be—invested with outlandish customs, it is true—other human beings speaking their language and sharing at least some of their values, even people to whom they were closely related.
In our time we’ve crossed the Solar System and sent four ships to the stars. Neptune lies a million times farther from Earth than New York City is from the banks of the Bug. But there are no distant relatives, no humans, and apparently no life waiting for us on those other worlds. No letters conveyed by recent emigrés help us to understand the new land—only digital data transmitted at the speed of light by unfeeling, precise robot emissaries. They tell us that these new worlds are not much like home. But we continue to search for inhabitants. We can’t help it. Life looks for life.
No one on Earth, not the richest among us, can afford the passage; so we can’t pick up and leave for Mars or Titan on a whim, or because we’re bored, or out of work, or drafted into the army, or oppressed, or because, justly or unjustly, we’ve been accused of a crime. There does not seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to these worlds, then, it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage—or to the advantage of the human species. Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds.
That’s what this book is about: other worlds, what awaits us on them, what they tell us about ourselves, and—given the urgent problems our species now faces—whether it makes sense to go. Should we solve those problems first? Or are they a reason for going?
This book is, in many ways, optimistic about the human prospect. The earliest chapters may at first sight seem to revel overmuch in our imperfections. But they lay an essential spiritual and logical foundation for the development of my argument.
I have tried to present more than one facet of an issue. There will be places where I seem to be arguing with myself. I am. Seeing some