Word: sagan
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...Astronomer Carl Sagan points out in his The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, any life on other planets may at this very moment be listening to our old Amos 'n' Andy and Backstage Wife programs, which only now would be reaching them...
...This is Sagan's space litany, presented in The Cosmic Connection. Readers who would like more detail could do worse than begin with the 39 mini-essays in the book. Sagan's purpose is nothing less than to refocus man's perspective about his place in the chain of being. Astronauts' bootprints left on the moon stir his imagination like "contemporary ziggurats," places "where the gods came down to earth and the population as a whole transcended everyday life." For him, the U.S. space program is justified simply because it irreversibly thrust us into interplanetary travel...
...Sagan's enthusiasms are widely accepted in the U.S., even by people who have never heard of him. California beach blonds zip the freeways, sporting bumper stickers like: FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL. The Gallup poll reports that 51% of the American people believe in UFOS. Even the fusty National Academy of Sciences was led recently to admit that contact with other civilizations "is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many...
...growing presumption about life on other worlds led, in 1971, to a multidisciplinary conference in Soviet Armenia on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Sagan, predictably, headed the American delegation. The resulting conference report just published by M.I.T. deals with attempts to peg the possible number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy at or beyond our own technological level...
...understandable to the interested layman, sometimes dips into technical specialties. But everybody should be interested in its basic message. Conferees from six nations concluded that there are about 1,000,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone. The nearest probable one is only a few hundred light-years away. As Sagan puts it: "The idea of extraterrestrial life is an idea whose time has come...