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Carl Sagan, a memorial and tribute
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Memorial
This Saturday, Nov 7th marks a special day for Skeptics and science enthusiasts worldwide, as people commemorate the legacy left behind by Carl Sagan, astronomer, astrochemist, humanist and author. Organizations across the country and around the world are coming together in the promotion of science to recognize the amazing contributions Sagan made, not only to our understanding of science, but to our need to understand science.
This Saturday will mark the eighth year a Bay Area scientist will be awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, presented at Wonderfest2009. In Florida, Broward college is hosting Carl Sagan Day, with talks from the James Randi Educational Foundation's James Randi, and now president Phil Plait, not to mention the Center for Inquiry's DJ Grothe as MC.
Perhaps no person has done more in their life to bring the universe to our fingertips than did Carl Sagan. Through his writing, television appearances, his debates, debunkings and most especially through his academic work, Sagan embodied science, and lived to share this passion with the world. Though he died in 1996 at the age of sixty-two, the fruits of his labor will remain evident for decades to come.
Carl Sagan is remembered, not for his work briefing astronauts, or for deciphering the hellish surface of Venus, but for his unflagging promotion of scientific reasoning. We only rarely look back with great fondness and admiration for his political work on nuclear disarmament, or the threat of global climate change. While important, when we think Sagan, we think of the beauty of the universe which he made manifest. Sagan's thirteen-part documentary, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, brought the magnificent discoveries of science into our homes, where the sheer majesty, brilliance and humbling volume of the universe was made clear. Through his popular writing adults and children alike were given the tools needed to avoid hucksters, charlatans and regular old self-deception, in an increasingly complex and complicated world. He stood before many of the greatest theological minds to calmly and politely inform them that their god is too small. He worked to contact galactic civilizations, yet never fell prey to his imaginations hopes and fears, like so many true believers of alien visitation. Most importantly for some, he reminded us to be humble. To do this, he did not resort to proclamations from on high, ancient myths, or demagoguery as so many before him. He used science.
On February 14, 1990, at a distance of 4 billion miles from Earth at Carl Sagan's insistence, the Voyager spacecraft turned around and pointed its camera back home. This was the result.
Tribute
Sagan's 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark is perhaps his most influential work. Within its pages he lovingly disassembles UFO myths, Atlantis conspiracy theories, astrology and many other pseudo-sciences, whose promoters crave the legitimacy of hard-won scientific support, without the pesky task of actually doing the work. Early in the first chapter, he writes,
It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can't manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data "highways," abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary anti-social predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.
How can we affect national policy - or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives - if we don't grasp the underlying issues?
Beginning Monday, Nov 9th, on what would be Carl Sagan's 75th birthday, and following each Monday after, I will be "consider[ing] the social ramifications" each of these topics in turn, beginning with fetal tissue transplants and taking them in no particular order.
Sagan is absolutely correct on this point, and not enough is done within Skepticism which focuses on these ramifications, and the promotion of scientific knowledge. We in America are a scientific society. From the food we eat to the vehicles we drive, how we communicate, how we breed, how we stay healthy - this is all science. We are also a democratic society where everyone is given a vote. In such a system, the only thing worse than not voting is voting without knowing why you are voting, or what you are voting for. Should NASA be given that extra three billion dollars? Is it really necessary to fund that environmental study of the local reservoir? These are questions for experts, yes, but the ultimate decision is in our hands.
We owe it to ourselves to make the right choices and not be beguiled by whoever sells the better message by appealing to our fears, or our hopes, our faiths or our intuitions. We owe it to ourselves to be educated. This project is simply a step in that direction. I hope you tune in each Monday to take it with me.
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