Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
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The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective is a book by Carl Sagan, produced by Jerome Agel. It was originally published in 1973.
The book covers several topics, but is primarily centered around the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence and the likelihood of the existence of more advanced civilizations and their distribution throughout the galaxy, as well as the universe.
A popular theme in the book includes Sagan narrating the possible opinions of more advanced intelligences and their views of the Earth, as well as communication with mankind. He also discusses the popularity of UFO sightings and attempts to mathematically portray the probability of such events. Another theme is the inclusion of his notorious view of astrology as a pseudoscience.
Throughout the book, prominent artwork is featured by Jon Lomberg, as well as various other artists.
[edit] Table of Contents
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[edit] Selected Quotes
[edit] Chapter 21. Beginnings and Ends of the Earth
Stars, like people, do not live forever. But the lifetime of a person is measured in decades, the lifetime of a star in billions of years. (page 145 line 1)
When the Earth becomes uninhabitable, Mars will gain a balmy and clement climate. Our remote descendants, if any, may wish to take advantage of this coincidence. (page 147 line 11)
[edit] Chapter 22. Terraforming the Planets
Is it possible that at some time in the future we might be able similarly to terraform other planets, to convert a Mars or Venus, today inhospitable to Man, into a clement and habitable environment? (page 150 line 16)
There is certainly no prospect in the immediate future of transshipping hundreds of thousand of people to other planets each day. (page 150 line 34)
The idea is simply to seed the clouds of Venus with a hardy variety of algae - a genus called Nostocacae was suggested - which would perform photosynthesis in the vicinity of the clouds. (page 151 line 22)
The amount of water vapor in the Venus atmosphere, if condensed on the surface of the planet, would give a layer of water about one foot high - not an ocean, but enough to do irrigation and to provide for other human needs. (page 152 line 9)
...even on airless worlds, the establishment of human colonies on their surfaces or even - in the case of small asteroids - in their interiors seems a possible future project for mankind. (page 153 line 12)
[edit] Chapter 23. The Exploration and Utilization of the Solar System
...cultural diversity is the forge for the survival of our civilization, just as biological diversity is the forge for the survival of life. (page 156 line 1)
At just this time in our history comes the possibility of exploring and colonizing our neighboring worlds in space. The opportunity has come to us not a moment too soon. (page 156 line 14)
I believe we will see semipermanent bases on the Moon by the 1980s. (page 159 line 10 )
Precisely because Mars is an environment of great potential biological interest, it is possible that on Mars there are pathogens, organisms which, if transported to the terrestrial environment, might do enormous biological damage - a Martian plague, the twist in the plot of H.G. Wells' 'War of the Worlds', but in reverse. (page 160 line 19)
Because of the danger of back-contamination of Earth, I firmly believe that manned landings on Mars should be postponed unil the beginning of the next century, after a vigorous program of unmanned Martian exobiology and terrestrial epidemiology. (page 161 line 24)
I, myself, would love to be involved in the first manned expedition to Mars. (page 161 line 30)
[edit] Chapter 24. Some of My Best Friends Are Dolphins
...the dolphin is probably another intelligent species on our own planet... (page 167 line 23)
Eventually, John believed that Elvar [a dolphin] had learned some dozens of words of English. To the best of my knowledge, no human has ever learned a single word of delphinese. (page 171 line 7)
What humans like about dolphins is clear. They are friendly, and faithful, at times they provide us with food (some dolphins have herded sea animals to fishermen); and they occasionally save our lives. Why dolphins should be attracted to human beings, what we do for them, is far less clear. (page 171 line 26)
[When a male dolphin named Peter tried to have sex with Carl Sagan in a large indoor pool] Suddenly it dawned on me, and I felt like some maiden aunt to whom an improper proposal had just been put. I was not prepared to cooperate, and all sorts of conventional expressions came unbidden to my mind - like, "Don't you know any nice girl dolphins?"
I wonder if some dolphins have thoughts about domesticating us. (page 175 line 27)
The brain size of whales is much larger than that of humans. (page 177 line 21)
I calculate that the approximate number of bits of information (individual yes/no questions necessary to characterize the song) in a whale song of half an hour's length is between a million and a hundred million bits. (page 178 line 1)
Are whales and dolphins like human Homers before the invention of writing, telling of great deeds done in years gone by in the depths and far reaches of the sea? (page 178 line 16)
In warfare, man against man, it is common for each side to dehumanize the other so that there will be none of the natural misgivings that a human being has at slaughtering another. (page 178 line 37)
For Americans, covert reclassifications of other peoples as 'untermenschen' [subhuman] has been the lubricant of military and economic machinery, from the early wars against the American Indians to our most recent military involvements, where other human beings, military adversaries but inheritors of an ancient culture, are decried as gooks, slopeheads, slanteyes, and so on - a litany of dehumanization - until our soldiers and airmen could feel comfortable at slaughtering them. (page 179 line 8 )
Though the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may take a very long time, we could not do better than to start with a program of rehumanization by making friends with the whales and the dolphins. (page 180 line 11)
[edit] Chapter 25. "Hello, Central Casting? Send Me Twenty Extraterrestrials"
Many soviet scientists consider 2001 to be the best American movie they have seen. (page 182 line 36)
[edit] Chapter 26. The Cosmic Connection
Many thousands of years ago a pseudoscience called astrology was invented. (page 185 line 5)
The entire universe is made of familiar stuff. The same atoms and molecules occur at enormous distances from Earth as occur here within our Solar System. (page 188 line 8)
All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of starstuff. (page 189 line 36)
[edit] Chapter 27. Extraterrestrial Life: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
We now know that the building blocks for the origin of life are in the cards of physics and chemistry; whenever standard primitive atmospheres are exposed to common energy sources, the building blocks of life on Earth drop out of the atmosphere in times of days or weeks. (page 195 line 5)
We now have, for the first time, the tools to make contact with civilizations on planets of other stars. It is an astonishing fact that the great one-thousand-foot-diameter radio telescope of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, run by Cornell University in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, would be able to communicate with an identical copy of itself anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. (page 195 line 19)
[edit] Chapter 28. Has the Earth Been Visited?
Wouldn't we look silly if we expended a major effort listening for radio messages or searching for life on Mars if, all the while, there was here on Earth evidence of extraterrestrial life? (page 199 line 7)
There are no reliably reported cases of strange machines landing and taking off... (page 200 line 1)
...the Sumerians are the direct cultural antecedents of our own civilization. (page 204 line 37)
If an artifact of technology were passed on from an ancient civilization - an artifact that is far beyond the technological capabilities of the originating civilization - we would have an interesting 'prima facie' case for extraterrestrial visitation. An example would be an illuminated manuscript, rescued from an Irish monastery, that contains the electronic circuit diagram for a superhetrodyne radio receiver. (page 205 line 20)
Most popular accounts of alleged contact with extraterrestrials are strikingly chauvinistic. (page 206 line 13)
[edit] Chapter 29. A Search Strategy for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligence
In the absence of any prior contact, how do we know precisely where to search [for extraterrestrial intelligence]? How do we know which frequency or "station" to tune in on? (page 209 line 21)
There is at least a fair probability that there are many civilizations beaming signals our way. ... Except for a few back-burner efforts in the United States and the Soviet Union, we - that is, mankind - are not carrying out the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. (page 212, line 34)
...a radio telescope designed for communication with extraterrestrial intelligence and an attached institute of exobiology would make a very fitting personal memorial for someone. (page 213 line 23)
[edit] Chapter 30. If We Succeed...
We are the most backward possible civilization able to engage in communication, and the vast spaces between the stars are a kind of natural quarantine, preventing us at any time in the near future from messing around out there. (page 215 line 21)
Interstellar communication will not be a dialogue. It will be a monologue. (page 216 line 30)
In fact, with instrumentation not very much more advanced than our own, essentially all the important insights of our civilization could be transmitted in a few days. (page 216 line 36)
The scientific, logical, cultural, and ethical knowledge to be gained by tuning into galactic transmissions may be, in the long run, the most profound single event in the history of our civilization. (page 218 line 25)
There are certainly enough nuclear weapons on our planet today to destroy every man, woman, and child many times over. (page 219 line 34)
[edit] Chapter 31. Cables, Drums, and Seashells
If we define an advanced civilization as one able to engage in long-distance radio communication using large radio telescopes, there has been an advanced civilization on our planet for only about ten years. (page 221 line 15)
Civilizations hundreds or thousands or millions of years beyond us should have sciences and technologies so far beyond our present capabilities as to be indistinguishable from magic. (page 222 line 20)
Communications between two very advanced civilizations will likely use a science and a technology inaccessible to us. (page 222 line 37)
At this very moment the messages from another civilization may be wafting across space, driven by unimaginably advanced devices, there for us to detech them - if only we knew how. (page 224 line 13)
[edit] Chapter 32. The Night Freight to the Stars
This is the moment of the homogenization of the world, when the diversities of societies are eroding, when a global civilization is emerging. (page 227 line 14)
There are as yet no interstellar trains, no machines to get us to the stars. But one day they may be here. (page 227 line 25)
[edit] Chapter 33. Astroengineering
It is surely possible that there are at least a few civilizations hundreds of millions or billions of years in our technological future. (page 229 line 24)
...at the present rate of technological progress it will be possible to construct such a Dyson sphere in perhaps some thousands of years. (page 230 line 17)
More seriously, the manifestations of very advanced civilizations may not be in the least apparent to a society as backward as we, any more than an ant performing his anty labors by the side of a suburban swimming pool has a profound sense of the presence of a superior technical civilization all around him. (page 232 line 8)
[edit] Chapter 34. Twenty Questions: A Classification of Cosmic Civilizations
The present power output of planet Earth is something like 1015 or 1016 watts; that is a million billion to ten million billion watts. (page 233 line 12)
A type II civilization is able to use for communications purposes a power output equivalent to a typical star, about 1026 watts. (page 233 line 23)
An important criterion of a civilization is the total amount of information that it stores. (page 234 line 31)
Philip Morrison has estimated that the total written contributions to our present civilization from classical Greek civilization is only about 109 bits. (page 236 line 36)
I estimate, then, that we and our civilization can be very well characterized by something like 1014 or 1015 bits. (page 237 line 34)
[edit] Chapter 35. Galactic Cultural Exchanges
If there exists a galactic community of civilizations that truly embraces much of the Milky Way, and if we are right that no information can be transmitted at a velocity faster than light, then most of the members - and all of the founding members - of such a community must be at least millions of years more advanced than we are. (page 241 line 27)
[edit] Chapter 36. A Passage to Elsewhen
It was Einstein's genius to have subjected our usual views of space, time, and simultaneity to a penetratingly logical analysis, which could have been performed two centuries earlier. (page 245 line 25)
Time dilation implies the possibility of time travel into the future. (page 246 line 36)
A space vehicle able to move close to the speed of light could traverse the Galaxy from one end to the other in less than a human life time. (page 247 line 5)
According to special relativity, it is even possible to circumnavigate the entire universe within a human lifetime, returning to our planet many billions of years in our future. (page 247 line 13)
Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. (page 248 line 1)
We do not know whether it is possible to get to this other place in the universe faster down a black hole than by the more usual route. (page 248 line 5)
We do not know whether it is possible to travel into the past by plunging down a black hole. (page 248 line 7)
[edit] Chapter 37. Starfolk I: A Fable
...there one day arose a molecule able crudely to make copies of itself - a molecule which weakly guided the chemical processes in its vicinity to produce molecules like itself - a template molecule, a blueprint molecule, a self-replicating molecule. (page 253 line 13)
For the first time, oxygen was produced in significant quantities in the atmosphere - oxygen, a deadly poisonous gas able to convert all the self-replicating organic molecules back into simple gases like carbon dioxide and water. (page 254 line )
Sex and death evolved - processes that vastly increased the rate of natural selection. (page 254 line 33)
[edit] Chapter 38. Starfolk II: A Future
...the matter of which we are made was generated in another place and another time, in the insides of a dying star five billion or more years ago. (page 257 line 6)
We live in a universe remarkably hospitable to life. (page 257 line 17)
There are 250 billion suns in our Milky Way Galaxy, and billions of other galaxies in the heavens. (page 257 line 20)
The initial chemical constituents for the origin of life are the most abundant molecules in the universe. (page 257 line 23)
Even if the Earth were started over again and only random forces again operated, nothing like a human being would be produced - because human beings are the end product of an exquisitely complicated evolutionary pathway full of false starts and dead ends and statistical accidents. (page 258 line 2)
The atoms necessary for the origin of life were cooked in the interiors of red giant stars. (page 258 line 15)
And what of life on Earth and man? They, too, for all we know, may have a future. And if not, there are billions of other stars and probably billions of other inhabited planets in our Galaxy. (page 258 line 27)
A piece of neutron star matter, if it could be transported to the Earth without falling apart, would sink effortlessly through the crust, mantle, and core of our planet like a razor blade through warm butter. (page 260 line 8)
The first pulsar to be detected was called, by its discoverers, only half impishly, LGM-1. The LGM stood for "little green men." (page 260 line 24)
Indeed, a star more massive than the Sun that fits into a sphere a mile across and rotates ten times every second is, in a certain sense, much more exotic than a civilization slightly more advanced than we, on the planet of another star. (page 261, line 8)
[edit] Chapter 39. Starfolk III: The Cosmic Cheshire Cats
In fact, our own universe is very likely itself a vast black hole. We have no knowledge of what lies outside our universe. (page 264 line 20)
Black holes may be apertures to distant galaxies and to remote epochs. They may be shortcuts through space and time. (page 264 line 32)
I can imagine, although it is the sheerest speculation, a federation of societies in the Galaxy that have established a black hole rapid transit system. A vehicle is rapidly routed throught an interlaced network of black holes to the black hole nearest its destination. (page. 266, line 8)
