Contact

by Carl Sagan

tell you, my friends, science is too important to be left to the scientists.

“I’ve always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.” “You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility. When I say I’m an agnostic, I only mean that the evidence isn’t in. There isn’t compelling evidence that God exists—at least your kind of god—and there isn’t compelling evidence that he doesn’t.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer:

But from the standpoint of the crew members, it would take a lot less. Maybe only a couple of years, depending on how close to light speed they travel.”

3BP haha

“You’re not worried about being lost, Palmer. You’re worried about not being central, not the reason the universe was created. There’s plenty of order in my universe. Gravitation, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, superunification, they all involve laws. And as for behavior, why can’t we figure out what’s in our best interest—as a species?”

“We are all humans.” This was a phrase you heard often these days. It was remarkable, in previous decades, how infrequently sentiments of this sort had been expressed, especially in the media. We share the same small planet, it was said, and—very nearly—the same global civilization. It was hard to imagine the extraterrestrials taking seriously a plea for preferential parley from representatives of one or another ideological faction. The existence of the Message—even apart from its enigmatic function—was binding up the world. You could see it happening before your eyes.

Something similar had happened, but abortively, in the United States, where for theological reasons attempts had been made to prevent public school students from learning about evolution, the central idea of modern biology. The issue was clear-cut, because a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible was widely held to be inconsistent with the evolutionary process. Fortunately for American molecular biology, the fundamentalists were not as influential in the United States as Stalin had been in the Soviet Union.

Umm

Her first thought—as soon as she had understood what had happened—was not for her old teacher David Drumlin crushed horribly before her eyes; not amazement at the prospect of Drumlin giving up his life for hers; not the setback to the entire Machine Project. No, clear as a bell, her thought had been I can go, they’ll have to send me, there’s nobody else, I get to go.

For one thing, she didn’t trust herself to speak. How much that she’d be saying would be for the good of the project, and how much to satisfy her own needs?

You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real.