IN THE BEGINNING. Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.
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After earning his doctorate Sagan began teaching at Harvard, and as a young scientist, he earned notice for research indicating that Venus endured a greenhouse effect that roasted the surface—hardly a place congenial for life. Later he would make strides in linking the changing surface features on Mars to planetary dust storms—dashing any hope that the markings were linked to seasonal changes in vegetation. It’s an obvious irony of his career that two of his major hard-science achievements showed the universe less hospitable to life, not more.
His speculative nature—freely discussing the possibility of life beneath the surface of the moon, for example—disturbed some of his colleagues. He seemed a bit reckless and had a knack for getting quoted in newspaper and magazine articles. He published in the popular press—including writing the “life” entry for Encyclopedia Britannica. His own calculations in the early 1960s showed that there could be about one million technological, communicative civilizations in our galaxy alone. And yet he thought UFOs a case of mass misapprehension. Among his papers is a November 1967 lecture Sagan gave in Washington as part of the Smithsonian Associates program. The very first question from an audience member was: “What do you think of UFOs? Do they exist?”
Though a skeptic about UFOs, Sagan had a tendency to be squishy in his comments about flying saucers, and at first he equivocated, saying there’s no evidence that these objects are alien spacecraft but leaving open the possibility that some “small fraction might be space vehicles from other planets.” But then he launched on a protracted riff about all the ways people get fooled.
“Bright stars. The planet Venus. The aurora borealis. Flights of birds. Lenticular clouds, which are shaped like lenses. An overcast [night], a hill, a car going up the hill, and the two headlights of the car reflect on the clouds—two flying saucers moving at great velocity in parallel! Balloons. Unconventional aircraft. Conventional aircraft with unconventional lighting patterns, like Strategic Air Command refueling operations. The list is enormous.”
Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard in 1968 but was quickly scooped up by Cornell. When not teaching and writing, he helped create plaques for the space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. The plaques notoriously depicted a naked man and woman, with some graphical descriptions of the position of the Earth in the solar system and other scientific information—just in case the spacecraft bumped into alien scientists out there somewhere.
To go a step further, It seems appropriate to use this a moment in the history of science when we are awakening to the other forms of consciousness on this planet, the ways of being alive and of understanding the environment on the part of other life forms here on earth..
Inevitably, if you’re interested in astrobiology and you’re interested in the question of intelligent life elsewhere, it requires a certain degree of self-consciousness about the lives we share on this planet. So, let us explore what is called exoplanets, and, imagining the deepest human future possible. Of course, inevitably, it’s also examining the shadow on that future which many informed people feel.
It seems to this lonely scribe that the flaming question to middle planet Earth should be… “are we ever going to be able to take the revelations of science to heart in the way that we take art to heart, the way that art affects us? Will we ever be able to really feel those things and awaken from our stupor and act”? That’s the big question, I think, of our moment in history. Is there anything that can make us value the things we need to live — our air, our climate, our water — more than we value money? That’s the big challenge. Is there anything that can make us think in the timescales of science, not the timescale of the balance sheet? We must live with our descendants in mind, and this includes a responsible piece of legislation on our combined use of the environment. This legislation must be fostered by a committee of the whole to include scientist, biologist, accountants, lawyers, and regular folk to clean up and protect the world in which we live and are now systematically destroying.
In the 70’s Carl Sagan, collaborated with fellow astrophysicist Ed Salpeter, to design life forms with plausible evolutionary histories for long term survival in the rolling clouds of Jupiter. Among them were ‘floaters,’ vast hydrogen blimps pumping helium and heavier gases out of their interior to retain only the lightest gas, hydrogen.
It was always in Sagan’s long-term plan in collaboration with Dr. Steven Soter of doing a series called Ethos. Each of them would have been, in their own way, kind of a season of Cosmos. But that was, tragically, not to be. After Sagan’s death, some wanted to do another season of Cosmos. Steve Soter Neil deGrasse Tyson joined Sagan’s widow to create an outline for a new season of Cosmos, and for several years, they went from network to network, three in all. I think much to the horror of Steve and Neil and our other colleague, Mitchell Cannold, every network wanted to do Cosmos, but none of them would give complete creative control to Sagan’s widow, nor would they give her the money necessary to create the kind of cinematic, transporting experience that she felt very strongly Cosmos had to be.
Since she was representing the deceased, and was not a scientist, she was driving these guys crazy by refusing to step aside and let the pros have the control. So, it didn’t happen for several years, until she met Seth MacFarlane. Who promised her he would send the concept to the stars, that he would bring in Peter Rice, who was then the head of the Fox television network? Seth kept every single one of those promises. He was passionate in his desire to see Cosmos. Not just that Cosmos would be a new season, that Cosmos would be produced, but that it would be on Fox, which was such an irony.
When Carl Sagan was alive, he didn’t write for the scientific publications alone. He wrote as well for Parade magazine, which is a Sunday supplement that reached 70 million ordinary people. He wrote about climate change, and a piece called “The Warming of the World.” This goes back to the ’80s. Disappointing to think how this great mind, this courageous individual would take the time to warn of a coming environmental disaster and how other scientists have been warning about the greenhouse effect of the building-up of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, only to be ignored by the political machine protecting the pockets of those who endow them through corruption.
Peter Rice had missed the first run of the original series and was kind enough to say he would watch the DVD. He watched it with his kids, who were horrified that they were going to be forced to watch what was then something like a 30-year-old science documentary.
But the thing that really turned Peter around was his kids, after some chuckles at the beginning about Carl’s sideburns or whatever, they became obsessed with the show. They would call him at work and say, “Daddy, when are you going to come home? Can we watch another Cosmos?” That immediately persuaded him that it was time to do it.
Chapter 3
EVIDENCE SUPPORTING BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION.
A long path leads from the origins of primitive "life," which existed at least 3.5 billion years ago, to the profusion and diversity of life that exists today. This path is best understood as a product of evolution.
Contrary to popular opinion, neither the term nor the idea of biological evolution began with Charles Darwin and his foremost work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Many scholars from the ancient Greek philosophers on had inferred that similar species were descended from a common ancestor. The word "evolution" first appeared in the English language in 1647 in a nonbiological connection, and it became widely used in English for all sorts of progressions from simpler beginnings. The term Darwin most often used to refer to biological evolution was "descent with modification," which remains a good brief definition of the process today.
Darwin proposed that evolution could be explained by the differential survival of organisms following their naturally occurring variation—a process he termed "natural selection." According to this view, the offspring of organisms differ from one another and from their parents in ways that are heritable—that is, they can pass on the differences genetically to their own offspring. Furthermore, organisms in nature typically produce more offspring than can survive and reproduce given the constraints of food, space, and other environmental resources. If