He was gifted, and shared that gift enthusiastically.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

Phil:
Please allow me to modify one of your statements:
Pale Blue Dot will be rightly considered one of the greatest passages ever written in the English language, or any other language!

Anybody suggest a good order to read some of Carl’s work? Or at least what I should start with? I am not sure if Symphony of Science is a book, where I think Cosmos is, and Pale Blue Dot is an Essay?

I will do the leg work. Just curious if anyone recommends an order, or a first to start with? Or maybe a hidden treasure of sorts.

As I respect Dr. Carl Sagan immensely something tells me he would want us little guys to call him Carl.

Seeing that surgery is around the corner I would like to get my Dr. Carl Sagan’s in a row if you will.

Cheers

i say that when I am drinking my nightly merlot

I loved Contact. Read it in 3 days. Tears an all. What made me cry is that throughout the book I could not let go of this feeling that; here, in print are my thoughts and feelings about some things in this Life. I felt less alone reading that book for the simple reason that certain dreams and understanding and realizations I have deep inside of me. . . are not that foreign. Contact made me feel. . . more a part of this world that somebody could relate to what I feel and improve on those original feelings with a beautiful philosophical expansion.

As much as I like Sagan and Science, I find his essay to be no less arrogant or conceited than any ideology or theology. He believes astronomy’s view of this piece of dust somehow invalidates any religion.

Well, that plus the principle of parsimony.

Interestingly, Christianity always portrayed heaven as being above us in some way. Then, when we developed instruments to look up and observe things in detail, we find that heaven is only metaphorically above us, not actually above us.

All religions are irrational, because they demand that a person believe in something for which there is no evidence.

“No hint that help will come from elsewhere”??? The countless writings of prophets and laymen who’ve witnessed such miracles of life, should at least HINT that there might be more than is seen through a lens.

How? Why would human documents and human experiences count as evidence for anything beyond what they are – aspects of the human condition?

There is no way of distinguishing a genuine (i.e. actual divinely-inspired) religious experience from a delusion. How then do you judge whether a prophet was delusional or otherwise? The answer – you cannot. The conclusion (skipping some of the reasoning for brevity) – there’s probably no god.

“The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe”? We, out of countless planets, exist as lifeforms with sentience.

You cannot know this.

We only know of the existence of about 600 exoplanets, and we conclude from our surveys of nearby stars that planets are common.

We find that life on Earth is ubiquitous (the only places you don’t find bacteria or archaea are inside active volcanoes and inside healthy tissues), and it seems likely that life exists elsewhere. Despite the silence, there is no reason to suppose that we are the only intelligent life in the universe (after all, the barriers to interstellar travel in anything like a human time frame are immense, and the barriers to interstellar communication, while orders of magnitude less, are still huge).

You seem to take the observation that we are the only known sentient life and extrapolate that to mean that we are the only sentient life, but you omit to consider the great difficulty of detecting sentient life in another star system.

That could indicate at least the smallest fraction of privilege, and hardly delusional.

Yes, it is delusional to suppose that we are the only sentient life. If we ever come up with a way whereby we could survey all the star systems in our galaxy and conclusively assess them for sentient life, and found none, then could we (very!) tentatively conclude that we alone represent sentient life. (If we are the only example of sentient life in our galaxy, then sentient life is rare indeed, especially if our survey turns up a good deal of non-sentient life. We could make some probabilistic argument about being the only sentient life in the universe, but we should never expect to be able to prove this conclusively.)

Delusional is to assume that your dogma, be it religious or scientific, holds the only true view of the universe.

What utter nonsense.

Delusion is to ignore hard, physical evidence, or to draw conclusions beyond what the evidence will support.

Science as a whole is anti-dogmatic. Nothing is fixed. All conclusions are – at least in principle – provisional. However, modern science does allow us to draw some perfectly reasonable conclusions about our extant theories of the universe. Our main scientific theories (atomic theory, evolution, QM, GR and so on) are at the very least pretty good approximations for how the universe behaves.

Having said that, I acknowledge that many people conflate the dogmatism of some individual scientists as dogmatism within science itself. It looks like this is what you have done.

Since it is impossible to distinguish any religious epxerience from a delusion, all we have from which to draw conclusions about the universe are evidence and reason. And a key reasoning tool is the principle of parsimony, which all religions violate.

Having said that, just because religion is irrational does not mean that it can’t be a valid part of the human condition. After all, the greater part of being human is to be irrational.

Carl had a unique insight, gravitas and poetry which has no equal.

I like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s broadcasts, but he is not Carl Sagan.

I just submitted to google the suggestion of a doodle to commemorate Carl Sagan’s birthday.

How about others joining in?

I wore this today and found it was quite popular. More random people knew what day it was today than I had expected.

“No hint that help will come from elsewhere”??? The countless writings of prophets and laymen who’ve witnessed such miracles of life, should at least HINT that there might be more than is seen through a lens.

“The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe”? We, out of countless planets, exist as lifeforms with sentience. That could indicate at least the smallest fraction of privilege, and hardly delusional.

Delusional is to assume that your dogma, be it religious or scientific, holds the only true view of the universe.

… what’s sad is that we have an ad for “quantum jumping” – or at least I do – showing up in the video. *sigh*

Thanks, Phil, for carrying the torch.