Wonder and Skepticism Carl Sagan Skeptical Enquirer Volume 19 Issue 1 January February 1995 1994 Carl Sagan I was a child in a time of hope I grew up when the expectations for science were very high in the thirties and forties I went to college in the early fifties got my Ph D in 1960 There was a sense of optimism about science and the future I dreamt of being able to do science I grew up in Brooklyn New York and I was a street kid I came from a nice nuclear family but I spent a lot of time in the streets as kids did then I knew every bush and hedge streetlight and stoop and theater wall for playing Chinese handball But there was one aspect of that environment that for some reason struck me as different and that was the stars Even with an early bedtime in winter you could see the stars What were they They weren t like hedges or even streetlights they were different So I asked my friends what they were They said They re lights in the sky kid I could tell they were lights in the sky but that wasn t an explanation I mean what were they Little electric bulbs on long black wires so you couldn t see what they were held up by What were they Not only could nobody tell me but nobody even had the sense that it was an interesting question They looked at me funny I asked my parents I asked my parents friends I asked other adults None of them knew My mother said to me Look we ve just got you a library card Take it get on the streetcar go to the New Utrecht branch of the New York Public Library get out a book and find the answer That seemed to me a fantastically clever idea I made the journey I asked the librarian for a book on stars I was very small I can still remember looking up at her and she was sitting down She was gone a few minutes brought one back and gave it to me Eagerly I sat down and opened the pages But it was about Jean Harlow and Clark Gable I think a terrible disappointment And so I went back to her explained it wasn t easy for me to do that that wasn t what I had in mind at all that what I wanted was a book about real stars She thought this was funny which embarrassed me further But anyway she went and got another book the right kind of book I took it and opened it and slowly turned the pages until I came to the answer It was in there It was stunning The answer was that the Sun was a star except very far away The stars were suns if you were close to them they would look just like our sun I tried to imagine how far away from the Sun you d have to be for it to be as dim as a star Of course I didn t know the inverse square law of light propagation I hadn t a ghost of a chance of figuring it out But it was clear to me that you d have to be very far away Farther away probably than New Jersey The dazzling idea of a universe vast beyond imagining swept over me It has stayed with me ever since I sensed awe And later on it took me several years to find this I realized that we were on a planet a little non self luminous world going around our star And so all those other stars might have planets going around them If planets then life intelligence other Brooklyns who knew The diversity of those possible worlds struck me They didn t have to be exactly like ours I was sure of it It seemed the most exciting thing to study I didn t realize that you could be a professional scientist I had the idea that I d have to be I don t know a salesman my father said that was better than the manufacturing end of things and do science on weekends and evenings It wasn t until my sophomore year in high school that my biology teacher revealed to me that there was such a thing as a professional scientist who got paid to do it so you could spend all your time learning about the universe It was a glorious day It s been my enormous good luck I was born at just the right time to have had to some extent those childhood ambitions satisfied I ve been involved in the exploration of the solar system in the most amazing parallel to the science fiction of my childhood We actually send spacecraft to other worlds We fly by them we orbit them we land on them We design and control the robots Tell it to dig and it digs Tell it to determine the chemistry of a soil sample and it determines the chemistry For me the continuum from childhood wonder and early science fiction to professional reality has been almost seamless It s never been Oh gee this is nothing like what I had imagined just the opposite It s exactly like what I imagined And so I feel enormously fortunate Science is still one of my chief joys The popularization of science that Isaac Asimov did so well the communication not just of the findings but of the methods of science seems to me as natural as breathing After all when you re in love you want to tell the world The idea that scientists shouldn t talk about their science to the public seems to me bizarre There s another reason I think popularizing science is important why I try to do it It s a foreboding I have maybe ill placed of an America in my children s generation or my grandchildren s generation when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when we re a service and information processing economy when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues when the people by the people I mean the broad population in a democracy have lost the ability to set their own agendas or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas when there is no practice in questioning those in authority when clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes our critical faculties in steep decline unable to distinguish between what s true and what feels good we slide almost without noticing into superstition and darkness CSICOP plays a sometimes lonely but still and in this case the word may be right heroic role in trying to counter some of those trends We have a civilization based on science and technology and we ve cleverly arranged things so that almost nobody understands science and technology That is as clear a prescription for disaster as you can imagine While we might get away …
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