This is the third book of Carl Sagan's work's, that I have read recently. Yet again, Mr Sagan has not left me disappointed.
This book consists of a collection of short essays on subjects that can be most complex, but Sagan explains it all, in such a way, so that we can all understand and enjoy it. It tells us about the Solar system, and touches on the topic of extraterrestrial life. Maybe the best thing about reading Sagans books, is I can hear his voice talking when reading. Even though this book is rather dated now, it most definitely makes for a riveting and
interesting read. Thank you Mr Sagan. 9780521783033 Having watched a few Carl Sagan videos caused me to recognize and memorize the color of his voice. I've noticed that while reading the book the little voice in my head is imitating the way he speaks. Carl Sagan's voice is one of understanding and reason. It's soothing and hopeful just like the tone of this book.
Carl Sagan (1934-1996), discusses with youthful enthusiasm and optimism the possibility and probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Also, his personal involvement, in the NASA's Mariner space probe missions to Mars, and their rivals, the Soviet's, Venera spacecraft missions to Venus - from the preparations and obstacles to the exogeology of these planets. This topic was in more detail elaborated in Sagan's later book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994). He also discusses his skepticism towards pseudoscience, astrology and ufology in particular, which is also more thoroughly presented in his book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996).
A very pleasant surprise was the level of concern for climate change he had 50 years ago! He states: But we live in a time when the atmosphere of Earth is being strongly modified by the activities of Man. It is of the first importance to understand precisely what happened on Venus so that an accidental recapitulation on Earth of the runaway Venus greenhouse can be avoided. We haven't come too far since then.
Also, the idea of terraforming Mars and becoming and interplanetary species is not the idea of Elon Musk (whose work I respect). Sagan dedicates a whole chapter to terraformation with a few proposals on how to achieve it. Here's one:...sprinkle carbon black over the caps, heat up the poles, and warm the planet. But the idea of becoming an interplanetary species was most wonderfully put by no other than the founder of astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935): The Earth is a cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.
The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (1973) covers a wide range of other topics too (perhaps too many), such as whale and dolphin behavior, a few personal stories, evolutionary biology and cosmology. Which also reminds me of Sagan's other books he wrote later in his life. This brings me to the conclusion that this is an all-in-one Sagan book, which covers and discusses all of the topics Sagan was passionate about. Therefore, if you want to read one Carl Sagan book, this is the one!
(4.5/5.0) 9780521783033 One thing that is so attractive about Sagan is his ability to be humbled in the face of someone else’s intelligence, including a room full of first graders. “A friend asked me to come to talk to his class,” Sagan writes in one essay in The Cosmic Connection, “which, he assured me, knew nothing about astronomy but was eager to learn.”
So Sagan goes to his young friend’s class, armed with slides of colorful gaseous nebulas to entertain the kiddies, and then makes the mistake of asking the class how mankind figured out the earth was round. One kid pipes up with the example of a ship’s master sinking beneath the horizon as it sails away from you. A second says what about an ellipse, you know, when you can see that the moon is round? Another says, well, what about that guy Magello who sailed around the world? You can’t sail around the world if it isn’t round. A fourth kid says, hey, don’t you know there’s pictures of earth from space, and the pictures are all round? And then a fifth kid says, oh, yeah? What about the Foucault pendulum experiment?
First graders, all. It is a considerably chastened astronomer who goes home from school that day, and Sagan’s not too proud to say so. 9780521783033 Finished another glorious book by Carl Sagan which is fantastic as usual. Here are some highlights :
From the first chapter, “A Transitional Animal”, describing the 5-billion year history of Earth.
In Man, not only is adaptive information acquired in the lifetime of a single individual, but it is passed on extra-genetically through learning, through books, through education. It is this, more than anything else, that has raised Man to his present pre-eminent status on the planet Earth.
We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow, biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.
Three chapters explore motivations for space exploration on three points: scientific interest, public interest, historical interest. Pages 51-52:
The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.
The planets are no longer wandering lights in the evening sky. For centuries, Man lived in a universe that seemed safe and cozy — even tidy. Earth was the cynosure of creation and Man the pinnacle of mortal life. But these quaint and comforting notions have not stood the test of time. We now know that we live on a tiny clod of rock and metal, a planet smaller than some relatively minor features in the clouds of Jupiter and inconsiderable when compared with a modest sunspot.
…
These realizations of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are profound — and, to some, disturbing. But they bring with them compensatory insights. We realize our deep connectedness with other life forms, both simple and complex. We know that the atoms that make us up were synthesized in the interiors of previous generations of dying stars. We are aware of our deep connection, both in form and in matter, with the rest of the universe. The cosmos revealed to us by the new advances in astronomy and biology is far grander and more awesome than the tidy world of our ancestors. And we are becoming a part of it, the cosmos as it is, not the cosmos of our desires.
Page 53.6: A fundamental area of common interest is the problem of perspective. The exploration of space permits us to see our planet and ourselves in a new light. We are like linguists on an isolated island where only one language is spoken. We can construct general theories of language, but we have only one example to examine. It is unlikely that our understanding of language will have the generaltiy that a mature science of human linguistics requires.
And as an aside, topics that are controversial today are not new, they’ve been around for decades, e.g. p57: But we live in a time when the atmosphere of Earth is being strongly modified by the activities of Man. It is of the first importance to understand precisely what happened on Venus so that an accidental recapitulation on Earth of the runaway Venus greenhouse can be avoided.
Chapter 9, about the historical interest of space exploration:
But it is remarkable that the nations and epochs marked by the greatest flowering of exploration are also marked by the greatest culture exuberance. In part, this must be because of the contact with new things, new ways of life, and new modes of thought unknown to a closec culture, with its vast energies turned inward.
Followed by historical examples, especially how the age of European exploration to the ‘new world’ coincided with Montaigne, Shakespeare, the authors of the King James Bible, Cervantes, et al.
In all the history of mankind, there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in course of exploration.
…
A human infant begins to achieve maturity by the experimental discovery that he is not the whole of the universe. The same is true of societies engaged in the exploration of their surroundings. The perspective carried by space exploration may hasten the maturation of mankind — a maturation that cannot come too soon.
He’s being optimistic about the pace of interplanetary exploration, perhaps, but the principle is valid.
Chapter 10 is a cute account of giving a talk to first-graders who do, to author’s surprise, understand why we know the Earth is round.
Chapter 11 describes the crank mail the author receives, from all manner of crazies, and a case study about a man in an asylum and how he was certain the planets are inhabited. (Because of his personal encouter with “God Almighty”.)
Other chapters in Part II involve the incompetence of the CIA and/or Air Force Intelligence; Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels as the inspiration for so many; more comments about humanity’s influence on the environment (p142); a restatement of the passage from p69, on p155 (“There is a generation of men and women for whom, in their youth, the planets were unimaginably distant points of light…”); and Sagan’s ‘belief’ that there would be semi permanent bases on the Moon by the 1980s.
Section III includes chapters about dolphins, concerning John Lilly, how the author was ‘propositioned’ by a dolphin, and how our disregard for dolphins and whales parallels the dehumanization of human enemies to make them easier to kill, and what this implies about potential contact with extraterrestrials; one about Sagan’s advice to Stanley Kubrick about depicting the aliens in 2001 (don’t depict them, imply their presence indirectly, advice which seems to have been taken)… and Chapter 26, the title chapter, “The Cosmic Connection”, which contrasts the presistent interest in astrology (“In his vanity, Man imagined the universe designed for his benefit and organized for his use” and p186.7, “It satisfied an almost unspoken need to feel a significance for humans beings in a vast and awesome cosmos…”) with the reality of our heritage, as a species on a planet of relatively heavy elements, elements the result of stellar evolution:
The fate of individual human beings may not now be connected in a deep way with the rest of the universe, but the matter out of which each of us is made is intimately tied to processes that occurred immense intervals of time and enormous distances in space away from us. Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. 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 star-stuff.
Other chapters concern extraterrestrial life as an “idea whose time has come”, focusing on the likelihood of other planetary system [he would so gratified by the recent Kepler discoveries]; a dismissal of the idea that UFOs are evidence of ETs having visited us, mostly on statistical grounds…. artifacts put forward as evidence, especially by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods, a bestselling book that has since languished into obscurity (I still own the paperback edition depicted on the Wikipedia page), of visitations by alien astronauts in ancient times… p207:
These artifacts are, in fact, psychological projective tests. People can see in them what they wish. There is nothing to prevent anyone from seeing signs of past extraterrestrial visitations all about him. But to a person with an even mildly skeptical mind, the evidence is unconvincing. Because the significance of such a discovery would be so enormous, we must employ the most critical reasoning and the most skeptical attitudes in approaching such data. The data do not pass such tests.
Sagan contemplates what it would mean if we succeeded in contact with ETs, via radio signals, even considering the likely decades-long pace of the exchange. p218:
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. There will be information in what we will no longer be able to call the humanities — because our communicants will not be human. There will be a deparochialization of the way we view the cosmos and ourselves.
Final chapters expand into considerations of astroengineering (Dyson spheres), classifications of cosmic civilizations, how long it would take for a ‘galactic cultural exchange’ to happen [always assuming the speed of light limitation for communication and travel], and speculation that (the then recent idea of) black holes might serve as a kind of cosmic transportation system.
The last three chapters are expansions on the idea of “starfolk” — histories and projections of the universe and mankind’s place in it. Here’s the last paragraph of the second of those chapters (p262).
The births of stars generate the planetary nurseries of life. The lives of stars provide the energy upon which life depends. The deaths of stars produce the implements for the continued development of life in other parts of the Galaxy. If there are on the planets of dying stars intelligent beings unable to escape their fate, they may at least derive some comfort from the thought that the death of their star, the event that will cause their own extinction, will, nevertheless, provide the means for continued biological advance of the starfolk on a million other worlds. 9780521783033 Wow!!! Happy birthday Carl Sagan. You would have been 79 today.
It's almost like a magical reality to read your book as a tribute, unintentionally and accidentally, on your birthday.
After the discovery of your birth date, I can only imagine by this random co-incidence, an ordinary mind like myself from a different sub-continent, who is not currently engaged in any scientific pursuit, is reading your book purely for entertainment and enlightenment. This is what you have to know, to understand how beautiful and imaginative your work is.
I may be somewhat biased to say that it is sad to see that people are loosing scientific temper; however you are the best astrophysicist author, an intelligent gift to humanity who will continue to inspire young mind around the planet. 9780521783033
In 1973, Carl Sagan published The Cosmic Connection, a daring view of the universe, which rapidly became a classic work of popular science and inspired a generation of scientists and enthusiasts. This seminal work is reproduced here for a whole new generation to enjoy. In Sagan's typically lucid and lyrical style, he discusses many topics from astrophysics and solar system science, to colonization, terraforming and the search for extraterrestrials. Sagan conveys his own excitement and wonder, and relates the revelations of astronomy to the most profound human problems and concerns: issues that are just as valid today as they were thirty years ago. New to this edition are Freeman Dyson's comments on Sagan's vision and the importance of the work, Ann Druyan's assessment of Sagan's cultural significance as a champion of science, and David Morrison's discussion of the advances made since 1973 and what became of Sagan's predictions. Who knows what wonders this third millennium will reveal, but one thing is certain: Carl Sagan played a unique role in preparing us for them. Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
This collection of essays is a justifiable predecessor, in many ways including the chronological order, of Carl Sagan's latter books. The topics that are briefly brushed upon here, have been thoroughly explored in his subsequent works and this piece of text does well to introduce to the reader all those aspects of planetary astronomy and sub-fields of it; namely exploration, terraforming and colonization of planets, communications with extra-terrestrial and terrestrial non-human intelligences, understanding of planetary geology to understand our own planet etc.
In his very familiar eloquent and ascetic manner, Sagan tells the reader about his/her place in the Universe in an essay Unicorn of Cetus, it shows the place of Sun among other stars and constellations as seen from elsewhere in the Galaxy. He tells about our efforts with searching and communicating with extra-terrestrial intelligence and how he had designed the Voyager Golden Record and Pioneer 10 & 11 plaques that were sent into space as messages from humanity to other worlds. One of the point that he emphasizes that our tendency to anthropomorphize the aliens is quite futile and it is extremely unlikely that they'll understand anything transmitted to them in conventional communication code, and that was taken care of when preparing those messages by incorporating into them audio-visuals along with descriptions of universally known scientific phenomena such as spectrum of Hydrogen atom.
He makes a point to explain the benefits of space exploration to humanity and seems quite optimistic about human endeavours in space. However, this book being published in 1973, it turned out that governments were reluctant to fund the exploratory agencies and we haven't achieved anything akin to what he had prophesized in those times.
In the next part, the exploration of Mars and Venus is described with exquisite details about their environment, geology and terraforming possibilities. His visionary approach regarding the future of human enterprise is embraced by anyone who reads and understands these ideas but as it always has been the case, our governments and majority of populace are often short-sighted and tend to neglect the long-term plans which need to be employed if we want to insure the survival of human race by voyaging to other planets, considering what a mess we have already made of the tiny, fragile and the only planet we have.
Surging forward, we encounter his illustrious musings upon non-human terrestrial intelligences such as Dolphins and Whales, and some features of extra-terrestrial intelligences. It seems very plausible to look in this matter with a different perspective other than that of humans, we must try to study other kind of intelligences and find out what aspects of intelligence are universal and what aspects are unique to us humans. It would help us establish a prospering galactic community, were we ever to discover and befriend other intelligences.
In the last section that is mostly speculative, but nonetheless based on sound scientific arguments, Sagan wonders about sharing of knowledge among various intelligences in the Galaxy and the galactic cultural homogenization that may take place akin to global cultural homogenization happening right now on our planet.
As always, he never fails to enthrall the reader with his evocative and inspiring authorship and makes us want to resume the feat which he had left for us unfinished. 9780521783033 Two language review :
I am saying this again: I read non-fiction books too sloooowwww...
Carl Sagan is my favorite astronomer. His writing style is flowing, easy and funny. His optimism and fascination towards the science and cosmos are inspiring.
I loved most of his essays about space explorations and ideas. Some were a bit repetitive and boring, so I skipped those parts. However most of them were enjoyable.
Kitabı uzun müddətə oxumağıma baxmayaraq çox hissəsini bəyəndim. Carl Saganın dili axıcı və sadə, bir o qədər də əyləncəlidir. İdeaları və kosmosa qarşı olan hədsiz marağı oxucunu həyəcanlandırır. Bəzi hissələrini sürətli keçirməyimə baxmayaraq, kitabdan həzz aldım.
9780521783033 La conexión cósmica es una reseña de diversos temas analizados por Carl Sagan, desde los inicios del ser humano, hasta los agujeros negros, pasando por la inteligencia de los delfines, hasta los diferentes tipos de civilizaciones, en donde ni siquiera entramos a la categoría del tipo 1.
Siempre leer a Carl Sagan es un alivio para la monotonía y es una receta para comprender al Universo con toda la humildad del caso. Entiendo y comprendo que el libro fue escrito antes de la década de 1980, sin embargo, es lo suficientemente lúcido como para poder ser leído aún 40 años después. Por ejemplo, la historia y el origen de la civilización humana, contada como fábula, me parece un relato maravilloso, probablemente uno de los mejores en este género.
Habla también sobre los agujeros negros, lo llama los gatos negros cósmicos, ya que los asemeja al Cheshire Cat. Probablemente los haya colocado al final del relato debido a que en esa época estaba en auge el asunto y bueno, encontrar agujeros negros es virtualmente cosa nada fácil.
El libro como tal, es comprender mucho sobre la civilización humana, con el fin de pasar al siguiente paso: aventurarnos hacia nuestro origen y conocer otras formas de vida. Carl Sagan siempre habla de esto (probablemente haya tenido mucho que hablar con John Gribbin), sin embargo, Carl es sumamente optimista para conocer vida extraterrestre. Mucha gente habla de la paradoja de Fermi, de la ecuación de Drake, de los accidentes que nos convirtió de silicatos inanimados a vida como la de ahora, sin embargo, el Universo, es tan, pero tan grande, que verdaderamente es imposible asegurar que estamos solos al 100%; si accidentes ocurrieron aquí, ¿por qué no en las otras doscientas mil millones de otras estrellas que hay únicamente en nuestra galaxia? 9780521783033 Carl Sagan's collection of short essays on all things cosmic is a very interesting and enjoyable read. The author presents cosmology, physics, biology and nuclear electrickery that can be understood by small children. (Somebody fetch me a small child.) His views of the universe from some thirty years back are still relevant and topical today. Not certain I agree with his ideas on extra terrestrial life forms and our ability to locate same. None the less, Sagan throws in human history, chemistry and the odd scraps of atomic theories to accompany us on his grand tour of our solar system and beyond.
Carl was such a cool dude. Almost a sixties hippy, his written work should be compulsory reading matter. We are stardust. We are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. 9780521783033 “I have just finished The Cosmic Connection and loved every word of it. You are my idea of a good writer because you have an unmannered style, and when I read what you write, I hear you talking. One thing about the book made me nervous. It was entirely too obvious that you are smarter than I am. I hate that.” —Isaac Asimov to Carl Sagan 9780521783033
FREE READ Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
