Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan Read Free Book Online

different alternatives, each potentially more successful than the pitifully small variety that face us today.
    A related problem is that the non-Western, non-technological societies, viewing the power and great material wealth of the West, are making great strides to emulate us–in the course of which many ancient traditions, world-views, and ways of life are being abandoned. For all we know, some of the alternatives being abandoned contain elements of precisely the alternatives we are seeking. There must be some way to preserve the adaptive elements of our societies–painfully worked out through thousands of years of sociological evolution–while at the same time coming to grips with modern technology. The principal immediate problem is to spread the technological achievements while maintaining cultural diversity.
    An opinion sometimes encountered is that the problem is technology itself. I maintain that it is the misuse of technology by the elected or self-appointed leaders of societies, and not technology itself, that is at fault. Were we to return to more primitive agricultural endeavors, as some have urged, and abandon modern agricultural technology, we would be condemning hundreds of millions of people to death. There is no escape from technology on our planet. The problem is to use it wisely.
    For quite similar reasons, technology must be a major factor in planetary societies older than ours. I think it likely that societies that are immensely wiser and more benign than ours are, nevertheless, more highly technological than we.
    We are at an epochal, transitional moment in the history of life on Earth. There is no other time as risky, but no other time as promising for the future of life on our planet.



6. Chauvinism
    J okes are a way of dealing with anxiety. There is a class of jokes dealing with extraterrestrial life. In one, the extraterrestrial visitor lands on Earth, walks up to a gasoline pump or a gumball machine–the accounts differ–and asks, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
    Elsewhere, beings are doubtless very different from us. But the joke assumes that extraterrestrial organisms will be, if not like human beings, then like gasoline pumps or gumball machines. The most likely circumstance is that extraterrestrial beings will look nothing like any organisms or machines familiar to us. Extraterrestrials will be the product of billions of years of independent biological evolution, by small steps, each involving a series of tiny mutational accidents, on planets with very different environments from those that characterize Earth.
    But such jokes underscore a general problem and a general virtue in thinking about life elsewhere. The problem is that we have only one kind of life to study, the co-related biology of the planet Earth, all organisms of which have descended from a single instance of the origin of life. It is difficult for the biologist, as well as the layman, to determine what properties of life on our planet are accidents of the evolutionary process and what properties are characteristic of life everywhere. The assumption that life elsewhere has to be, in some major sense, like life here is a conceit I will call chauvinism.
    While such chauvinism has been common throughout human history, clearer views have occasionally surfaced, for example, by the great French astronomer Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Leplace. In his classic work La Mecanique Celeste he wrote: “[The Sun’s] influence gives birth to the animals and plants which cover the surface of the Earth, and analogy induces us to believe that it produces similar effects on the planets; for it is not natural to pose that matter, of which we see the fecundity develop itself in such various ways, should be sterile upon a planet so large as Jupiter, which, like the Earth, has its days, its nights, and its years, and on which observation discovers changes that indicate very active forces. Man, formed for the