Academics From The United States

"Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel. Men have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason; it has been expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old and new. We find it in the delightful myth of Antaeus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians and in many hints and statements of thinkers of the present time. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic — and this we know it is, for certain — then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature."

"Russians are lucky - they have socialism and Stalin."

"Alternate currents, especially of high frequencies, pass with astonishing freedom through even slightly rarefied gases. The upper strata of the air are rarefied. To reach a number of miles out into space requires the overcoming of difficulties of a merely mechanical nature."

"Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth."

"I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts. In short, a bit of a crook."

"I was applying to colleges in high school and I already knew I wanted to study the universe at age seventeen because I knew at age nine. So my applications were dripping with the universe. I was accepted at Cornell, and it's time to decide what school you go to, and a set of other schools as well. The admissions office, unknown to me, sent my application to Carl Sagan. He was already famous. He was already on Johnny Carson, Tonight Show. To get him to just comment on it. Carl Sagan then sent me a letter, hand signed, saying, 'I understand you're considering Cornell. If you come by and visit I'd be happy to show you the lab.' And I said, 'Is this Carl Sagan?' I showed it to mom, dad, I said, 'Could this be?' And it was. I wrote back and I said, 'Yeah, I'll go up in two weekends.' He met me on a Saturday morning in the snow, gave me a tour of his lab. I'm in his office, he reaches back, pulls out one of his books, signs it to me. It's time for me to leave, he drives me to the bus station, snowing a little heavier. He writes his home phone on a sheet of paper, says, 'If the bus can't get through, call me, spend the night at our place.' And I thought to myself, who am I? I'm just some high school kid. And to this day, to this day, I have this duty to respond to students who are inquiring about the universe as a career path, to respond to them in the way that Carl Sagan had responded to me."

"Carl Sagan... examined the cures from cancer that resulted from a visit to Lourdes... where people were healed by a simple contact with the holy waters, and found... that, of the total cancer patients who visited... the cure rate was, if anything, lower than the statistical one for s. It was lower than the average for those who did not go to Lourdes. Should a statistician infer that... odds of survival deteriorate after a visit..?"

"Sagan's first wife, Lynn Margulis, was one of the principal architects of the Gaia Hypothesis. Put their viewpoints together, and the conclusion you would reach would be that nuclear war could have a significant enough effect that it could even kill Gaia."

"As astronomer Carl Sagan thought about what Fermi said Fermi paradox], he began to be alarmed. ...This could only mean that advanced civilizations destroy themselves before they get that far, a viewpoint Sagan published in 1966."

"The work of Carl Sagan has been a profound influence in my life, and the life of every individual who recognizes the importance of humanity's ongoing commitment to the exploration of our universe."

"Inspired by the impact hypothesis, a group of astrophysicists led by Carl Sagan decided to try to model the effects of an all-out war and came up with the concept of "nuclear winter," which, in turn, generated its own wave of media coverage."

"Astronomer Carl Sagan noted that even when it is viewed from so far away that it is a pale dot, Earth is discernibly blue."

"When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me—it still sometimes happens—and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. ... That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. ... That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. ... That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it's much more meaningful. ... The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful."

""This is a deathwatch," Carl told me calmly. "I'm going to die." "No," I protested. "You're going to beat this, just as you have before when it looked hopeless." He turned to me with that same look I had seen countless times in the debates and skirmishes of our twenty years of writing together and being wildly in love. With a mixture of knowing good humor and skepticism, but as ever, not a trace of self-pity, he said wryly, "Well, we'll see who's right about this one." Sam, now five years old, came to see his father for one last time. Although Carl was by now struggling for breath and finding it harder to speak, he managed to compose himself so as not to frighten his little son. "I love you, Sam," was all he could say. "I love you, too, Daddy," Sam said solemnly. Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other's eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever."

"We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."

"The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it."

"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe."

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."

"If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space."

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

"When there isn't enough food, the body has to make a decision on how to invest the limited foodstuff available to it. Survival comes first, growth comes second. And in this kind of nutritional triage, the body seems obliged to rank learning, last. It sort of it's better to be stupid and alive, than smart and dead."

"The whole idea of what happens when you read a book, I find absolutely stunning. Here's some product of a tree, little black squiggles on it, you open it up, and inside your head is the voice of someone speaking, who may have been dead 3000 years, and there he is talking directly to you, what a magical thing that is."

"We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sun light that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise sent us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is, where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always there, if time will one day flow backwards or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. What is the smallest piece of matter, why we remember the past and not the future, and why there is the universe?"

"The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee."

"Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception."

"There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus... the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. ...in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable."

"Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon... was handed to him by the god Marduk... this is a bamboozle... a pious hoax. ...if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody should do," he would have been much less successful..."

"There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. ...such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. ...Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords."

"Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? ...So let's call it "theophorin"...What could the selective advantage of theophorin be? ...to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey."

"Now, it is sometimes said that people who take a skeptical approach to UFOs or ancient astronauts or indeed some varieties of revealed religion are engaging in prejudice. I maintain that this is not prejudice. It is postjudice. That is, not a judgement made before examining the evidence but a judgement made after examining the evidence."

"The hope that if they had intervened many times in human history, surely in the present time, a time of great crisis recognized in the 1960s and '70s and manifestly clear today in the age of fifty-five thousand nuclear weapons, that the extraterrestrials would come and prevent us from doing the worst to ourselves. And in that sense I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves."

"If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?"

"The origin of life happened in significantly less than 500 million years. ...Six days was once a popular hypothesis. ...A process that happens quickly is a process that is in some sense likely... this evidence suggests that the origin of life was in some sense easy, in some sense sitting in the laws of physics and chemistry."

"The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life."

"There is a very stunning range of studies... of interstellar organic matter... the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. ...complex organic materials are everywhere."

"The organic molecules found in the gas phase in the atmosphere of Titan by Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft include hydrogen cyanide, cyanoacetylene, butadiene. cyanogen, propylene, propane, acetylene, ethane, ethylene, Methane, likewise. And the principle constituent of the atmosphere, there as here, is molecular nitrogen. It is, I think, very interesting that we have a world in the outer solar system that is loaded with the stuff of life."

"This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story."

"Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them."

"We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system."

"Let's go back to the solar nebula... with the temperature declining the farther we get from the Sun. ...at different distances from the Sun, different materials will condense out, because they have different vapor pressures or different melting points. ...water condenses out roughly at the vicinity of the Earth, whereas silicates condense out closer to the Sun... you have to go out to somewhere near the present distance of Saturn before methane condenses."

"This image of four spectra is taken from one of Huggins's publications. ...You can see that the Comet Winnecke resembles olive oil more than it does Comet Brorsen."

"When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. ...It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ...with trivial exceptions, all organisms on Earth use... an enzyme, to control the rate and direction of the chemistry of life. ...a nucleic acid to encode the hereditary information ...the identical code book for translating nucleic acid language into protein language. ...At the molecular level, we are all virtually identical."

"Suppose your father... walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week."

"Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God."

"Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. ...Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r'2... as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do."

"At birth all of us imagine that we are the universe, and we don't distinguish the boundaries between ourselves and those around us. ...in some social situations, there is the sense that we are central, important. ...there was a natural projection of those attitudes upon the universe."

"Projected upon the natural world... is the idea of privilege. ...Ever since the invention of civilization, there have been privileged classes... some groups that oppress others and that work to maintain these hierarchies of power. The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position."

"The history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance..."

"If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is a quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason that it seems counterintuitive is that is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate."