Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (Random House, New York, 1997), 241 pp. ISBN 0-679-41160-7.
This collection, published posthumously, is a melange of essays by Carl Sagan which well reflrect his catholic tastes and varied interests. The first sections include disquisitions on quantification -- no, he did not say "billions and billions" in his Cosmos series and, yes, it is possible to estimate the grains of sand in all the beaches of the earth (maybe 1020) or the number of elementary particles in the cosmos (1080). He includes an excellent table on the big numbers (trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, etc.) and a listing of exponential notations, from atto (10-18) to exa (1018). A history of chess is followed by articles on sports, light, and a listing of four cosmic questions Sagan considered important: 1) Was there ever life on Mars? 2) Is Titan (one of Saturn's satellites) a laboratory for the origin of life? 3) Is there intelligent life elsewhere (a question to which he devoted much time and effort)? and 4) What is the origin and fate of the universe?Sagan warns, in several places, about the damage we are inflicting on our fragile world. Inadvertently, we are becoming a danger to ourselves, creating "a range of new evils, hard to see, hard to understand, problems that cannot really be cured -- certainly not without challenging those already in power." He uses this as a springboard for his belief (so eloquently expressed in A Demon Haunted World, reviewed in our Winter 1997 issue) that public understanding of science is essential. The middle section of the book, he states, "is about understanding and accommodating the environmental upheavals -- both for good and for ill -- brought on by science and technology."
He has chapters on the destruction of the ozone layer and on the "warming of the world," as he puts it -- written with his usual clarity and completeness. He analyzes several alternative energy sources and weighs the pros and cons of each. He details the origin of and quotes in full, the January 1990 text, sent by scientists to religious leaders, of the joint appeal -- "Preserving and Cherishing the Earth: An Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion."
There are other interesting addenda: an article on the relationship between the United States and the then Soviet Union that would be published, simultaneously, in the mose widely circulated publications of both countries. It is interesting to see his listing of changes made in the article, "inflicted" he calls it, by the Russians. There is an interesting attempt (cowritten with his wife, Ann Druyan) to reconcile the pro-life and pro-choice positions on abortion. Also interesting (and amusing) is a listing of the rules of human conduct with analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each -- The Golden Rule, The Silver Rule, The Brazen Rule, The Iron Rule, and The Tit-for-Tat Rule (well known to all of us).
In a chapter titled "The Twentieth Century" Sagan states that "The twentieth century will be remembered for three broad innovations: unprecedented means to save, prolong, and enhance life; unprecedented means to destroy life, including for the first time putting our global civilization at risk; and unprecendented insights into the nature of ourselves and the universe. All three of these developments have been brought forth by science and technology. . . . All three have roots in the distant past." What a perceptive -- and accurate -- listing!
The final and rather heart-rending chapter, is "In the Valley of the Shadow," his account of what turned out to be his fatal illness -- myelodysplasia. Agnosticism is as much an article of faith as is religious belief , and he held true to his views until the end.
In the Epilogue Ann Druyan recounts participating with her husband on a committee to select the contents of a phonograph record to be affixed to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, which have now escaped the solar system. This was an opportunity to include a glorious diversity of the world's culture in a message projected to last one billion years! As Druyan says, "it was conceivable that, Noah-like, we were assembling the ark of human culture, the only artifact that would survive into the unimaginably distant future."
Would there be life on Earth after that time? The continents would be so altered by plate tectonics as to completely change the surface of the planet. As the author reminds us, one billion years ago the most complex life forms on Earth were bacteria. What life forms (if any) will be extant in a billion years? This is an intriguing thought.
Sagan has been quoted as saying that "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers." This book is a fitting epitaph to a life well-lived, one which, in turn, touched the lives of millions of others and awakened them to the beauties and the perils of science and technology.
- Irma S. Jarcho
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