Carl Sagan on... a personal view

Carl Sagan is a versatile scientist who was an active partner in most of the American space operations, and in recent years has been devoting a lot of effort to spreading science among the general public, with his rare talent of writing about science in a popular and understandable way for everyone, in a fascinating and exciting way.

How many

The bard's eye, which will wander in error, will look from heaven to earth and from there to heaven, and when the imagination will create for him a majority in the comings of unknown things, his pen will wear the same sides, and from zero, he will assign a dwelling place and also a name he will call.

William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act E, Image; 1

When I was ten years old, I decided - out of almost complete nakedness as to the difficulty involved in the problem - that the universe is populated to exhaustion. There were too many options
For our earth to be the only inhabited planet. And in light of the diversity of life on earth (the trees looked very different from most of my friends), I imagined that living elsewhere would seem very strange. I tried hard to imagine what the nature of this life would be, but despite all my efforts I could only produce an earthly mirage, a fusion of existing plants and animals.

Around that time, I was introduced through a friend to Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Martian Tales. Before that I didn't think much about Mars, but here, in the adventures of John Carter, there appeared before my eyes an inhabited world, outside the Earth, that made skin and sinews to the point of stopping breathing: ancient seabeds, large pumping stations on canals, and a variety of Creatures, some of them exotic. There were, for example, beasts of burden with eight legs, the cords.

Reading these novels lifted my spirits, at first. Then the doubts began to gnaw slowly. The surprise of the plot in the first novel I read, about John Carter, was based on the fact that he forgot that the year on Mars is longer than the year on Earth. I myself thought that if you arrive at another planet, one of the first things to find out would be the length of the day and the year (by the way, I can't recall any reference by Carter to the impressive fact that the Martian day is almost as long as the terrestrial day). After all, it's as if she expected to find the familiar features of his home planet instead of Ether. that are not on Earth. I spent many minutes with my eyes tightly closed, concentrating with all my might on a new primary color. But all I could find was always a shade of brown or a shade of dirty plum. How could there be another primary color on Mars, let alone two? What is it anyway? Primary color? Is it something related to physics or something related to physiology? I decided that Burros may not have known what he was talking about, but there is no doubt that he provoked his readers to think. And in the many chapters, which did not provide clay for thought, there were many evil enemies, Exactly as required, and outrageous duels - more than what is needed for a ten-year-old charmer imprisoned within the city walls, in the summer of Brooklyn.

A year later I came across by chance in the neighborhood candy store, a magazine called Amazing Bionic Science. A quick look at the cover, and a quick glance at the brochure itself, taught me that this was what I was looking for. With what effort I was able to add penny to penny to the required price, I opened the magazine where I happened to be, sat down on a bench not more than twenty feet from the candy store and read for the first time a short story from the treasury of modern science fiction, "Pete Can Fix It," by Raymond P. Jones, an endearing story of a journey through time that endured a holocaust after a nuclear war.

I knew what an atomic bomb was - I remember an excited friend telling me that it was made of atoms - and now I heard for the first time about the social consequences of nuclear weapons. But that little device that Pete, the mechanic from the garage, installed on cars so passers-by could go on short explorations into the wilderness of the future - what was that little device? What was it made of? How could you reach into the future and come back? If Raymond F. Jones knows, because then he just didn't interpret.

It soon became clear to me that I had been caught on the hook. Every month I waited impatiently for the arrival of amazing science fiction. I read Jules Verne and the third'. Wells, I've read both science fiction anthologies I could find cover to cover. I rated the quality of the stories using a scorecard, similar to the one I set up for baseball. Many of the stories received high marks in the field of presenting interesting questions. The level score of the answers was usually much lower.

Part of me is still ten years old. But usually Harini is older. My critical skills and maybe even my literary tastes have improved. On re-reading the end has not yet arrived by L. Ron Hubbard, a book I first read at the age of fourteen, I was amazed to see how much worse the book was than I remembered, so bad that I seriously considered the possibility of two novels bearing the same name, by the same author, but of vastly different quality. Again I can't believe everything I'm told like I could before. The plot of Neutron Star by Larry Niven is based on incredible tidal forces arising from a strong gravitational field. And yet, we are asked to believe that in a few hundred thousand years, in the days when interstellar space flight will be a trivial matter, there will be people who will forget the existence of tidal forces of this type. We are asked to believe that the first test of a neutron star will be done by a manned spacecraft, not exactly an unmanned spacecraft. Too much is being asked of us. In a novel of ideas, the ideas have to prove themselves.

The same feeling of uneasiness pulsated in me many years before, when I read in Verne's work that the loss of weight in a journey to the moon occurs only at that point in space where the gravitational pull of the earth is there to cancel that of the moon, and when I found in Wells the invention of the anti-mineral Gravity called Kaborit: why would there still be an artery of Kaborit on earth?

Shouldn't he have thrown himself into space a long time ago? In Douglas Trumbull's Deshana Bayin Kol, a science fiction film made with great technical skill, the trees die in closed and large ecosystems sailing in space: at the end of weeks of painstaking research and feverish reading of a botany book, the solution is found: the plants, it turns out, need sunlight. Trumbull's characters are capable of building interplanetary cities but they have forgotten the rule of distance dependence. I was willing to ignore the description of Saturn's rings in pastel colors, but not this thing.

The same problem repeats itself for me in Path of the Stars (referring to the TV series, TREK Star or as it was called in our country, 'Star Trek'), a film which, as I know, has gained many followers, and which some serious friends told me should be accepted as an allegory and not as a literal one. But when astronauts from Earth land on some distant planet and find the local humans in the midst of a conflict between two
Nuclear superpowers - calling themselves Yangs and Komis, or their phonetic equivalents - at this moment any vestige of faith finally collapses. In a worldwide national society, several hundred years into the future, the ship's officers are embarrassingly Anglo-American. Only two of the twelve or fifteen interstellar ships - Kongo and Potemkin - will be given non-English names. (Potemkin and not Aurora?) And the idea of ​​a successful hybrid between a "Vulcan" and a human from Earth simply ignores everything we know about molecular biology. claims that broadcast network executives considered even the mildest biological innovations, such as Mr. Spock's pointy ears and perpetually diminutive cheeses, to be overly bold; they believed that such vast differences between Vulcans and humans would only confuse the audience and therefore took care to obscure all The Vulcans' Unique Physiological Features Similar problems plague me in movies that show slightly modified familiar creatures - ten-foot-tall spiders - as they threaten Earth's cities: since insects and spiders breathe by pulsation, all these robbers should have died of suffocation before they had enough to charge. on the first city.

Harini believes that the same thirst for wonder that filled me at the age of ten still nestles in me today. But since then I have learned a little about the real structure of the world. It seems to me that science fiction is akin to science. It seems to me that science is more refined, more intriguing and more awe-inspiring than much of science fiction. We will recall some of the scientific findings of the last decades: Mars is covered with dry channels of ancient rivers; Apes can learn languages ​​of many hundreds of words, understand abstract concepts and construct new grammatical usages; There are particles that pass effortlessly through the entire Earth, so that there is no difference between the number of particles rising from our feet and the number of those coming down from the sky: in the constellation Swan there is a double star, one of its components has a gravitational acceleration so high that no light can escape from it: It is possible that it burns on the inside from too much radiation, but on the outside it is hidden from view. It seems to me that in the face of all these things, many of the routine ideas of science fiction pale. I see the relative absence of innovations of this kind and the distortions in the way of scientific thinking, so frequent in science fiction, as opportunities irreparably wasted. Real science can serve as the subject of fascinating and exciting fiction just as much as fake science, and I believe that it is important to take advantage of every opportunity to spread scientific ideas in a civilization that is based on science and does almost nothing to ensure that the science is understood.

But the best science fiction was and still is excellent. There are stories constructed as a thought process, filled with reasonable details of an unfamiliar company, until I get swept up in them before I have enough time to review them with a critical eye. Stories of this type include Robert Heinlein's The Door to Summer, Alfred Bester's Face to the Stars and The Wrecked Man, Jack Finney's Once and Again, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Walter M. Leibovitz's Hymn. Miller. One can ponder the ideas of these books. Heinlein's wishy-washy comments regarding the practical possibilities and social utility of robots for home use have proven themselves over the years to be truly amazing. The questions of the Earth's ecologists as they arise from hypothetical extraterrestrial ecosystems (such as in sand dunes), in my opinion, do an important social service. The Shrunken Man, by Hari Hasse, presents an exciting cosmological speculation that has received a real revival today. After all, this is the idea of infinite regression in the universe, so that each of our elementary particles is a universe at a lower level than us and we are an elementary particle in the next universe, upwards.

Only a very few science fiction novels manage to combine deep human sensitivity with a standard science fiction theme. Such are, for example, Deceiving Moon by Alges Boudris, many of the essays of Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon - for example, the latter's book Here and Ready, an amazing picture of schizophrenia as it is perceived from the inside. He is also mentioned in a provocative introduction to Ariosto's Orlando Furiosi.

Once upon a time an exquisite story of science fiction, written by the astronomer Robert S. Richardson, and we answered the cosmic rays that are supposedly born in the process of constant creation. Isaac Asimov's story A Man Breathing There describes a poignant observation of the emotional tension and sense of entertainment of some of the best theoretical scientists. The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clark presents to many Western readers a fascinating speculation in Eastern languages.

One of the great blessings of science fiction is its ability to bombard crumbs and particles, hints and proverbs of unknown knowledge from the reader or knowledge
which is not within his reach. Heinlein and Ivan's book The Crooked House was probably the first encounter of many readers with four-dimensional geometry with any chance of understanding. One book in the field of science fiction presents in practice the mathematics associated with Einstein's last attempt to establish the theory of the uniform field; Another book presents an important equation in the field of population genetics. Asimov's robots were "positronic" because the positron was discovered near the time the book was written. Asimov never explained how positrons could power robots but his readers were introduced to a positron counter. Jack Williamson's rhodomagnetic robots were equipped with methuronium, rhodium and palladium, the group of metals that appear in the periodic table immediately after iron, nickel and cobalt. There was a hint of comparison with the magnetism of iron. I assume that in today's science fiction there are roboguys that are quarks or have "charm" ("Charm" or Charm is a special charge attributed to elementary particles. It is customary to present it using a special quantum number - translator's note) and their power to provide some kind of short verbal introduction to the excitement of elementary particle physics in our generation. Finally Alata by L. Sprague de Camp is an excellent introduction to Rome in the days of the Gothic invasions and Asimov's series, The Institution, offers a very useful summary of the dynamics of the Roman Empire in its heyday, although this is not explained in the books. Stories dealing with a journey through time - such as, for example, Heinlein's three impressive experiments - Wombim all of you, "by his bootstraps and the door to summer" - force the reader to ponder the nature of causality and the existence of the arrow of time. After all, these are books you think about while sitting in the bath or walking through the forest on the first snowy day of winter.

Another great privilege of modern science fiction is expressed in the various art forms that have been conceived for it. Seeing in our mind's eye a vague image of the hypothetical surface of another planet is one thing; A close examination of a detailed painting of the same landscape, by Chesley Bonstel at his best, is a completely different matter. A sense of astronomical wonder radiates from the best works of contemporary artists such as Don Davis, John Lomberg, Rick Sternbach, Robert McCall. And in Diane Ackerman's verse one can discern a spark of ripe astronomical poetry, something naturally woven into the standard themes of the fictional journey.

Ideas from the school of science fiction are common today even in somewhat different guises. There are science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark who provided us with compelling and cautionary summaries, in a non-narrative form, concerning many aspects of science and society. There are contemporary scientists who are introduced through science fiction to a larger audience than usual. For example, in the thought-provoking novel - The Listeners, by James Gunn - we find a comment from fifty years ago about my colleague, the astronomer Frank Drake: "Drake! What does he know?” A lot, as it turned out later.
Pure science fiction, disguised as facts, is also found in a great abundance of pseudo-scientific essays, organizations and belief systems. One of the science fiction writers, L. Ron Hubbard, founder of a successful cult called Scientology - this happened, according to one report, overnight, and following an intervention: Hubbard claimed that he could rise to Freud's level, invent a religion and get rich from it. The classic ideas of science fiction are today established in unidentified flying objects and belief systems in ancient astronauts - although it is difficult for me to avoid the assertion that Stanley Weinbaum (in the Valley of the Blows) did it not only better but also earlier than Erich von Daniken.

R. De Wit Miller in Inside the Pyramids was able to anticipate both von Daniken and Velikovsky, and propose a hypothesis about the origin-outside-of-the-sphere-to-the-supposed-land of the pyramids that is more perfect in its interior than can be found in all the essays on ancient astronauts and pyramidology. In the Name of the Dreamers, by John D. MacDonald (a writer of science fiction who in the meantime became one of the most interesting detective writers of our generation) we find the sentence: "And in the mythology of the earth there are traces. . . who left large ships and chariots that crossed the sky". The story Shalom Adon, by Hari Bates, was turned into a movie, The Day the Earth Stood Queen (which ignored the central element of the plot - the one who controls the spaceship from outside the Earth in the book was the robot, not necessarily the man). Some sober researchers claim that the movie depicted a flying saucer Menicha Tus over Washington became known for his role in the UFO "flood" that took over Washington in 1952 shortly after the premiere. Many popular spy stories these days, about the shallow nature of their heroes and the forced plot marked by miracles, resemble to the point of gracelessness the pulp of Fiction from the 30s and 40s The interweaving of science and science fiction sometimes produces controversial and strange results. It is not always clear whether life imitates art or vice versa.

For example, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. writes an excellent epistemological novel The Sirens of Titan, in which he states, among other things, that on Saturn's largest moon there exists a completely non-hostile environment. In recent years, when several planetarium scientists, including myself, have presented evidence that Titan holds a dense atmosphere and possibly higher than expected temperatures, many have drawn my attention to Kurt Vonnegut's prediction. But Vonnegut studied physics at Cornell University and was naturally up-to-date on astronomical innovations (many of the best science fiction writers have a scientific or engineering background; such are, for example, Paul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement and Robert Heinlein). In 1944, an atmosphere of matan was discovered on Titan, the first satellite in the solar system to be discovered to have an atmosphere. In this case, as in many similar cases, art imitates life.

The trouble is that our understanding of the planets is changing faster than their representation in science fiction. A twilight zone with a pleasant climate on a hot planet that is in full synchronization with that planet's self-rotation, Venus covered in jungles and swamps, Mars industrious in trenches, these are all common descriptions of classic science fiction, but also based on the mistakes of astronomers who studied the planets a few decades ago. The mistaken ideas were faithfully copied into science fiction stories, and served as reading material for many of the young people who were destined to be the next generation of planetary astronomers. In any case, in order to arouse interest in young people, it was also at the same time to make it difficult for them to correct the mistakes of the astronomers of the previous generation. But when a change began in our knowledge about the planets, a corresponding change immediately took place in the landscapes described in the science fiction stories that emerged in their wake. Again it is not common to find a science fiction story written today in which there is a description of algae farms on the surface of Venus. (By the way, the makers of the mythology of contact with UFOs are changing at a slower pace. You can still find reports of flying saucers that came from Venus and contained beautiful human beings, in long white robes living in a kind of Venusian paradise. Temperatures of 480°C prevailing on The face of Venus allows us to relate to such stories with a degree of restraint. That's right, the idea of ​​the "curvature of space" is an age-old institution in science fiction, but it was not born within science fiction. It was born out of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The connection between the descriptions of Mars in science fiction and the actual studies of Mars is so close that, following the sending of Mariner 9 to Mars, we had no problem naming several craters on Mars after science fiction writers who have passed away. This is how you will find craters on Mars named after God. third'. Wells, Edgar Reese Burroughs, Stanley Weinbaum, and John W. Campbell Jr. These names were even officially approved by the International Astronomical Union. There is no doubt that other science fiction writers will join the list immediately after their death.

Young people's great interest in science fiction is reflected in movies, TV shows, comic books and the demand for science fiction classes in high schools and colleges. From my experience I can testify that such classes can be an excellent educational experience or a disaster, all depending on the way of execution. Lessons based on reading material chosen by the students do not provide the latter with an opportunity to read what they have not yet read. Lessons in which there is no attempt to expand the canvas of the science fiction plot, to also include the appropriate science, miss a great educational opportunity. But properly designed science fiction classes, in which science or politics are an integral component - such classes can, in my humble opinion, make a useful and long-term contribution to curricula.

Perhaps the greatest human importance of science fiction is that it offers experiments of the future, journeys to alternative destinations, attempts to reduce shocks to the future. After all, this is part of the explanation for the strong attraction of young people to science fiction: they will be the ones who will live in the future. It is my belief that no society on earth today is properly adapted to life on earth in a hundred or two hundred years (if we are wise enough or lucky enough to live longer until then). We desperately need an investigation of alternative predictions for the future, they are experiments and they are conceptual. The novels and stories of Eric Frank Russell largely satisfy this need. They have shown us plausible alternative economic systems or the great efficacy of passive but cohesive resistance to an occupying power. In modern science fiction, such as Heinlein's book, a tyrant It is white, you can also find useful suggestions on how to bring about a revolution in a computerized technological society.

Ideas of this type, provided that they are introduced to them at a young age, can also influence behavior in adult life. Many scientists deeply involved in the study of the solar system (and I am among them) were first turned in this direction thanks to science fiction. And the fact that some of the science fiction is not at the highest level is irrelevant. Ten year olds don't read scientific literature anyway.

I don't know if time travel, into the past, is possible. It has the potential to give rise to problems of cause and effect that arouse a lot of skepticism in me. But there are people who think about this issue. The so-called "closed time-like lines" - tracks in space-time that allow unlimited time travel - appear in several solutions to the field equations of general relativity.

A claim that has recently been put forward, perhaps mistakenly, says that closed time-like lines appear in the vicinity of a large holiday cylinder speeding around itself. Wonder to what extent science fiction has influenced general relativity who study such problems. But it is also possible that meetings between science fiction and alternative cultural elements have played an important role in bringing about fundamental social changes.

In all the history of the world until this very day there has never been a time that has known so many important changes. The adaptation to change and the calculated search for alternative predictions for the future are the keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps also of the human race. Our generation is the first generation that also grew up on science fiction ideas. I myself know many young people who will of course be interested in broadcasting from an extraterrestrial civilization, but in no way will they be amazed. They have already adapted to this future. I believe that it would not be an exaggeration to say that if we are going to survive, science fiction is going to make a vital contribution to the continuation and evolution of our civilization.