Word: sagan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DRAGONS OF EDEN by CARL SAGAN 263 pages. Random House...
Like squids, scientists protect themselves with clouds of impenetrable ink. Not Carl Sagan. His jargon-free book The Cosmic Connection (1973) involved thousands of readers in the search for life beyond earth. Last year, during the Mars probe, he became a TV celebrity with plausible descriptions of the creatures that might be populating outer space. The Dragons of Eden should involve thousands more in the exploration of inner space - the human brain...
...Carl Sagan, scientist, philosopher and poet...
...first photographs, none of the Viking scientists seemed particularly disappointed that the pictures showed no obvious signs of life-no lichen, bushes or trees, nothing even remotely resembling an animal or the monsters or little green men beloved by generations of science-fiction writers. Said Exobiologist Carl Sagan: "The pictures do not suggest that the planet is filled, pole to pole, with living things." But, noted Sagan, nothing in the pictures ruled out the existence of life on the planet either. Soffen added that the lander's immediate vicinity held half a dozen niches in which conventional biology, including...
Long Odds. Such apparent inconsistencies are trivial when compared with the slipshod logic of one of Temple's major premises. He invokes the belief of such sympathetic star trackers as Astronomer Carl Sagan and Astro physicist I.S. Shklovski'ï that intelligent life probably exists elsewhere in our galaxy. Out of billions of planets, so the argument goes, statistical probability dic tates that there must be some that have evolved like earth. But Temple seems confused about probability. "The odds against life occurring fairly frequently within our galaxy are impossible ones," he writes. In fact, odds must be long...