Chapter 17, The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is So Anxious to Establish Communication With An ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence), excerpted from
Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book:
Sagan is right in saying that despite all the claims of UFO sightings and encounters of a third kind, extraterrestrial creatures, and such, not a single artifact, e.g., a piece of metal, a bit of clothing of a visitor, a piece of tissue, a fingernail, has been recovered.
Yet Sagan has written whole volumes promoting the probability of the existence of intelligent life on the billions of planets orbiting the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies -- this in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that life exists anywhere else in the Cosmos, let alone intelligent life. Of all the billions of electromagnetic waves from the Cosmos received here on Earth, not a single one can be attributed to an ETI.
Therefore, one might ask Sagan the same question he put to UFOers: Of all the countless bits of data received from outer space, the observations of astronomers, the millions of units recorded by radio telescopes, why has not a single bit of information been received which could not be attributed to the random noise of the Cosmos?Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely? (pick one)
(a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all: in Velikovski, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spaceship in Vermont.
(b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don't talk, dolphins don't talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.
(c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.
Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely? (pick one)
(a)
(b)
(c)
Let’s add (d) He wasn’t lonely. Sagan was a pothead addled, publicity seeking opportunist with a closet full of turtle neck sweaters to don during the sexed up “Age of Aquarius.”