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In 1985, Carl Sagan gave Gifford Lectures, a scientific tradition of lecture series established to promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest term (this is googleable). Psychologist and Philosopher William James gave lectures on the same occasion in 1902. His lectures were entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience (published later). In tribute to James, Sagan entitled his The Varieties of Scientific Experience, and later on published, too.
Below are parts excerpted from Scientific Experience. The conjectures are beautiful, I hope they will be proven valid (italics are mine).
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“I find myself engaged in the spacecraft exploration of nearby worlds, something that would have been considered the most rank fantasy just two generations ago, when the Moon was the paradigm of the unobtainable. Some of you will remember those poems and popular songs --“Fly Me To The Moon,” meaning asking for the impossible. And yet in our time a dozen human beings have walked on the surface of the Moon...”
“I’ve spent much of my time over the last twenty years in the exploration of solar system. Our robot emissaries have left the Earth, have visited every planet known to the ancients, from Mercury to Saturn, and reconnoitered some forty attendant smaller worlds, the satellites of those planets. We have flown by all those worlds, we have orbited and landed on three of them: the Moon, Venus, and Mars. There are something approaching a million close-up pictures of other worlds in our libraries. And it is remarkable experience. Here’s world never before known by human beings, and then, for the first time, it is explored. This is a continuation of the spirit adventure that I think has been a propelling force in human history. The worlds are lovely. They’re exquisite. It is a kind of aesthetic experience to see them.”
“...We started hundreds of thousand to millions of years ago as itinerant tribespersons, in which the fundamental loyalty was to a very small group, by contemporary standard. Typical hunter-gatherer groups are maybe a hundred people, so the typical person on the planet had an allegiance to a group of no more than a hundred or a few hundred people.
The names that many of these tribes give to themselves are touching in their narrowness. All over the world people call themselves “the people,” “the men,” “the humans.” All those other tribes, they aren’t people, they aren’t men, they aren’t humans. They are something else. Now, that doesn’t mean that a state of constant warfare existed among these tribes, as Thomas Hobbes, for example, imagined. A significant fraction of of those early gropus, there is reason to think, were benign, calm, peace-loving, not interested in systematic, bureaucratized aggression, which is the function of states at a later time.
As time passed, groups have merged, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, and the unit to which personal identification and loyalties are due has grown. The sequence is known to all of those who take courses in the history of civilization at universities, in which we pass through allegiances to larger groups, to city-states, to settled nations, to empires. Today the typical person on the Earth is obviously a patchwork quilt of political, economic, ethnic, and religious identifications, owing allegiance to a group or groups consisting of a hundred million people or more. It’s clear that there is a steady trend, if the trend continues, there will be a time, probably not so far in the future, when the average person’s typical identification is with the human species, with everyone on Earth.”
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* Among many things, Carl Sagan is known as an astronomer. He is one of significant leading scientists who promote public understanding of science. He wrote Broca’s Brain: Reflection on the Romance of Science in 1979, Cosmos in 1980, and Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of Human Future in Space in 1994 (his other publications is definitely googleable). His novel Contact, inspired by his scientific odyssey, was adapted into a box-office feature-length film under the same title, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey. Scientific Experience is later published, too (edited by Ann Druyan, an author and, without coincidence, one of the producer of the movie Contact)
* I don't know if this amount of quoting is a copyright breach (I hope not)
.
In 1985, Carl Sagan gave Gifford Lectures, a scientific tradition of lecture series established to promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest term (this is googleable). Psychologist and Philosopher William James gave lectures on the same occasion in 1902. His lectures were entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience (published later). In tribute to James, Sagan entitled his The Varieties of Scientific Experience, and later on published, too.
Below are parts excerpted from Scientific Experience. The conjectures are beautiful, I hope they will be proven valid (italics are mine).
---
From Chapter 8:
The Crimes Against Creation
The Crimes Against Creation
“I find myself engaged in the spacecraft exploration of nearby worlds, something that would have been considered the most rank fantasy just two generations ago, when the Moon was the paradigm of the unobtainable. Some of you will remember those poems and popular songs --“Fly Me To The Moon,” meaning asking for the impossible. And yet in our time a dozen human beings have walked on the surface of the Moon...”
“I’ve spent much of my time over the last twenty years in the exploration of solar system. Our robot emissaries have left the Earth, have visited every planet known to the ancients, from Mercury to Saturn, and reconnoitered some forty attendant smaller worlds, the satellites of those planets. We have flown by all those worlds, we have orbited and landed on three of them: the Moon, Venus, and Mars. There are something approaching a million close-up pictures of other worlds in our libraries. And it is remarkable experience. Here’s world never before known by human beings, and then, for the first time, it is explored. This is a continuation of the spirit adventure that I think has been a propelling force in human history. The worlds are lovely. They’re exquisite. It is a kind of aesthetic experience to see them.”
From Chapter 9:
The Search
The Search
“...We started hundreds of thousand to millions of years ago as itinerant tribespersons, in which the fundamental loyalty was to a very small group, by contemporary standard. Typical hunter-gatherer groups are maybe a hundred people, so the typical person on the planet had an allegiance to a group of no more than a hundred or a few hundred people.
The names that many of these tribes give to themselves are touching in their narrowness. All over the world people call themselves “the people,” “the men,” “the humans.” All those other tribes, they aren’t people, they aren’t men, they aren’t humans. They are something else. Now, that doesn’t mean that a state of constant warfare existed among these tribes, as Thomas Hobbes, for example, imagined. A significant fraction of of those early gropus, there is reason to think, were benign, calm, peace-loving, not interested in systematic, bureaucratized aggression, which is the function of states at a later time.
As time passed, groups have merged, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, and the unit to which personal identification and loyalties are due has grown. The sequence is known to all of those who take courses in the history of civilization at universities, in which we pass through allegiances to larger groups, to city-states, to settled nations, to empires. Today the typical person on the Earth is obviously a patchwork quilt of political, economic, ethnic, and religious identifications, owing allegiance to a group or groups consisting of a hundred million people or more. It’s clear that there is a steady trend, if the trend continues, there will be a time, probably not so far in the future, when the average person’s typical identification is with the human species, with everyone on Earth.”
---
* Among many things, Carl Sagan is known as an astronomer. He is one of significant leading scientists who promote public understanding of science. He wrote Broca’s Brain: Reflection on the Romance of Science in 1979, Cosmos in 1980, and Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of Human Future in Space in 1994 (his other publications is definitely googleable). His novel Contact, inspired by his scientific odyssey, was adapted into a box-office feature-length film under the same title, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey. Scientific Experience is later published, too (edited by Ann Druyan, an author and, without coincidence, one of the producer of the movie Contact)
* I don't know if this amount of quoting is a copyright breach (I hope not)
.
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