The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [22]
An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children on television and radio and in movies, newspapers, magazines, comics and many books -might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?
3
The Man in the Moon
and the Face on Mars
The moon leaps
In the Great River’s current…
Floating on the wind,
What do I resemble?
Du Fu, Travelling at Night’ (China, Tang Dynasty, 765)
Each field of science has its own complement of pseudo-science. Geophysicists have flat Earths, hollow Earths, Earths with wildly bobbing axes to contend with, rapidly rising and sinking continents, plus earthquake prophets. Botanists have plants whose passionate emotional lives can be monitored with He detectors, anthropologists have surviving ape-men, zoologists have extant dinosaurs, and evolutionary biologists have Biblical literalists snapping at their flanks. Archaeologists have ancient astronauts, forged runes and spurious statuary. Physicists have perpetual motion machines, an army of amateur relativity disprovers, and perhaps cold fusion. Chemists still have alchemy. Psychologists have much of psychoanalysis and almost all of parapsychology. Economists have long-range economic forecasting. Meteorologists, so far, have long-range weather forecasting, as in the sunspot-oriented Farmer’s Almanac (although long-term climate forecasting is another matter). Astronomy has, as its most prominent pseudoscience, astrology But because I work mainly with planets, and because I’ve been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the pseudo-sciences that most often park themselves on my doorstep involve other worlds and what we have come so easily in our time to - the discipline out of which it emerged. The pseudosciences sometimes intersect, compounding the confusion - as in telepathic searches for buried treasures from Atlantis, or astrological economic forecasting.
But because I work mainly with planets, and because I’ve been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the pseudo-sciences that most often park themselves on my doorstep involve other worlds and what we have come so easily in our time to call ‘aliens’. In the chapters immediately following, I want to lay out two recent, somewhat related pseudoscientific doctrines. They share the possibility that human perceptual and cognitive imperfections play a role in deceiving us on matters of great import. The first contends that a giant stone face from ages past is staring expressionlessly up at the sky from the sands of Mars. The second maintains that alien beings from distant worlds visit the Earth with casual impunity.
Even when summarized so baldly, isn’t there a kind of thrill in contemplating these claims? What if such hoary science fiction ideas - resonant surely with deep human fears and longings -actually were coming to pass? Whose interest can fail to be aroused? Immersed in such material, even the crassest cynic is stirred. Are we absolutely sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we can dismiss these claims? And if hardened debunkers can sense the appeal, what must those untutored in scientific scepticism, like Mr ‘Buckley’, feel?
For most of history - before spacecraft, before telescopes, when we were still largely immersed in magical thinking - the Moon was an enigma. Almost no one thought of it as a world.
What do we actually see when we look up at the Moon with the naked eye? We make out a configuration of irregular bright and dark markings - not a close representation