Cosmos

Carl Sagan:
The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

Carl Sagan:
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together - surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.

Carl Sagan:
Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

Carl Sagan:
Up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perception awaits us. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic, religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

Carl Sagan:
The cosmos is also within us, we're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos, to know itself.

Carl Sagan:
The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.

Carl Sagan:
There are some hundred billion galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars, 1011 x 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations. From eight billion light-years away we are hard pressed to find even the cluster in which our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded, much less the Sun or the Earth. The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost.

Carl Sagan:
Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People of all nations came here to live, to trade, to learn. On any given day, its harbors were thronged with merchants, scholars, and tourists. This was a city where Greeks, Egyptians, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, Persians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Italians, Gauls, and Iberians exchanged merchandise and ideas. It is probably here that the word 'cosmopolitan' realized its true meaning - citizen, not just of a nation, but of the Cosmos. To be a citizen of the Cosmos...

Carl Sagan:
Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

Carl Sagan:
A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars.

Carl Sagan:
[Flying the Spaceship of the Imagination] Here we see another inhabited planet. I wonder what kind of new political ideas they have down there, what religions...

Himself - Host:
Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears.

Himself - Host:
What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Himself - Host:
For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence.

[first lines]

Himself - Host:
There are two ways to view the stars: as they really are, and as we might wish them to be.

[last lines]

Himself - Host:
As a boy, Kepler had been captured by a vision of cosmic splendor--a harmony of the worlds, which he sought so tirelessly all his life. Harmony in this world eluded him. His three laws of planetary motion represent--as we now know--a real harmony of the worlds; but, to Kepler, they were only incidental to his quest for a cosmic system based on the perfect solids--a system, which, it turns out, existed only in his mind. Yet, from his work, we have found that scientific laws pervade all of nature, that the same rules apply on earth as in the skies, that we can find a resonance--a [pause] harmony--between the way we think and the way the world works. When he found that his long-cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest delusions. That is the heart of science.

Himself - Host:
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science.

Himself - Host:
This is the age of planetary exploration, when our ships have begun to sail the heavens. In those heavens there are some worlds much like hell; our planet is, in comparison, much like a heaven. But the gates of heaven and hell are adjacent and unmarked.

[first lines]

Himself - Host:
All my life, I've wondered about life beyond the earth. On those countless other planets that we think circle other suns, is there also life? Might the beings of other worlds resemble us, or would they be astonishingly different? What would they be made of? In the vast Milky Way galaxy, how common is what we call life? The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.

[last lines]

Himself - Host:
We've heard so far the voice of life on only a single world, but, for the first time--as we shall see--we've begun a serious, scientific search for the cosmic fugue.

Himself - Host:
Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened.

Himself - Host:
The planets of the galaxy might be filled with micro-organisms, but big beasts and vegetables and thinking beings might be comparatively rare.

Himself - Host:
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

Carl Sagan:
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Himself - Host:
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Himself - Host:
But the brain does much more than just recollect. It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions.

[first lines]

Himself - Host:
The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.

[last lines]

Himself - Host:
We have a choice: we can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15-billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what *we* do - here and now - with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

Himself - Host:
For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.

Himself - Host:
...There was the astronomer Ptolemy, who compiled what is known today as the pseudo-science of astrology. His Earth-centered universe held sway for 1,500 year, showing that intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Himself - Host:
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are creatures of the cosmos and always hunger to know our origins, to understand our connection with the universe. How did everything come to be? Every culture on the planet has devised its own response to the riddle posed by the universe. Every culture celebrates the cycles of life and nature. There are many different ways of being human.

Himself - Host:
But, an extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars. Our ancestors knew that their survival depended on understanding the heavens. They built observatories and computers to predict the changing of the seasons by the motions in the skies. We are all of us descended from astronomers.

Himself - Host:
Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.

Himself - Host:
A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

Himself - Host:
Our loyalties are to the species and the planet, we speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring.