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Carl Sagan -
Cosmos (1980)
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The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place.
Carl Sagan
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A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.
Carl Sagan
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Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
Carl Sagan
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The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
Carl Sagan
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Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits.
Carl Sagan
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The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.
Carl Sagan
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We are, almost all of us, descended from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about unpredictable or disgruntled deities.
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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Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe.
Carl Sagan
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In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!
Carl Sagan
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The scientific world view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have discovered science.
Carl Sagan
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If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be?
Carl Sagan
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When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.
Carl Sagan
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Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky.
Carl Sagan
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What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.
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For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.
Carl Sagan
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Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
Carl Sagan
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National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
Carl Sagan
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The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.
Carl Sagan
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In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
Carl Sagan
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A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.
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Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.
Carl Sagan
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But why had science lost its way in the first place? What appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order. The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy. You could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves. Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.
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We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.
Carl Sagan
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Carl Sagan
Born:
November 9, 1934
Died:
December 20, 1996
(aged 62)
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