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Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. Were we to plunge down a black hole, we would re-emerge, it is conjectured, in a different part of the universe and in another epoch of time.... Black holes may be the entrances to Wonderland. But are there Alices or white rabbits?
Carl Sagan
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The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it
Carl Sagan
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It is too late to be shy and hesitant. We have announced our presence to the cosmos — in a backward and groping and unrepresentative manner, to be sure — but here we are!
Carl Sagan
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The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.
Carl Sagan
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In all the history of mankind, there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course exploration.
Carl Sagan
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The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
Carl Sagan
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Societies will, of course, wish to exercise prudence in deciding which technologies that is, which applications of science are to be pursued and which not. But without funding basic research, without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, our options become dangerously limited.
Carl Sagan
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The assumption that technical civilizations must necessarily make an appearance, even after many billions of years of biological evolution, implies that the ultimate purpose, or goal, in the formation of stars and planets is the production of intelligent beings and technical civilizations - an idealistic and teleological view.
Carl Sagan
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It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course.
Carl Sagan
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The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal
Carl Sagan
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Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.
Carl Sagan
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I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.
Carl Sagan
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We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the perils before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us, equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense a stirring of the breeze.
Carl Sagan
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Science — pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake — is a deeply emotional matter for those who practice it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what's been discovered lately.
Carl Sagan
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We are constantly prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.
Carl Sagan
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The asteroid belt may be a place where a planet was once prevented from forming because of the gravitational tides of the giant nearby planet Jupiter; or it may be the shattered remains of a planet that blew itself up. This seems improbable because no scientist on Earth knows how a planet might blow itself up, which is probably just as well.
Carl Sagan
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The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us.
Carl Sagan
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Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?
Carl Sagan
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I think the most significant creative activities of our or any other human culture — legal and ethical systems, art and music, science and technology — were made possible only through the collaborative work of the left and right cerebral hemispheres...We might say that human culture is the function of corpus callosum.
Carl Sagan
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Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future.
Carl Sagan
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Organisms die but their genes pass on — often mutated and redistributed, it is true, but genes nevertheless; and it is difficult, therefore, to escape the conclusion that the design of the organism is merely to provide for gene multiplication and survival.
Carl Sagan
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Quantify. If whatever it is you're explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you'll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
Carl Sagan
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In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.
Carl Sagan
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The so-called generation gap is a consequence of the rate of social and technological change. Even within a human lifetime, the change is so great that many people are alienated from their own society. Margaret Mead had described older people as involuntary immigrants from the past to the present.
Carl Sagan
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In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian.
Carl Sagan
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Carl Sagan
Born:
November 9, 1934
Died:
December 20, 1996
(aged 62)
Bio:
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer and popular science writer.
Known for:
Cosmos (1980)
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)
The Dragons of Eden (1977)
Contact (1985)
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