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Download : COSMOS - Carl Sagan
The
Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest
contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the
spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant
memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the
greatest of mysteries.
The
size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.
Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary
home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem
insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious
and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have
made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos
and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to
consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that
understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I
believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which
we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
Those
explorations required skepticism and imagination both. Imagination
will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go
nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to
test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure - in elegant
facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of
awe.
In
the summer and fall of 1976, as a member of the Viking Lander Imaging
Flight Team, I was engaged, with a hundred of my scientific
colleagues, in the exploration of the planet Mars. For the first time
in human history we had landed two space vehicles on the surface of
another world. The results, described more fully in Chapter 5, were
spectacular, the historical significance of the mission utterly
apparent. And yet the general public was learning almost nothing of
these great happenings. The press was largely inattentive; television
ignored the mission almost altogether.
When it became clear that a definitive answer on whether there is
life on Mars would not be forthcoming, interest dwindled still
further. There was little tolerance for ambiguity. When we found the
sky of Mars to be a kind of pinkish-yellow rather than the blue which
had erroneously first been reported, the announcement was greeted by
a chorus of good-natured boos from the assembled reporters - they
wanted Mars to be, even in this respect, like the Earth. They
believed that their audiences would be progressively disinterested as
Mars was revealed to be less and less like the Earth. And yet the
Martian landscapes are staggering, the vistas breathtaking. I was
positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest
exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred
scientific topics - the origin of life, the Earth, and the Cosmos,
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the
universe. And I was certain that this interest could be excited
through that most powerful communications medium, television.
