Humans are story tellers. I’m not sure who said that first, but Joseph Campbell made a career out of demonstrating how mythologies transmit information about how to live in the world using personified symbols in narrative structures. But mythologies were products of pre-scientific societies. Ever since scientific understandings of the universe have become more prominent after the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, science has faced opposition from people who cling to the mytho-poetic and religious world view. But when the symbols of myth are revealed to be untrue in a literal sense, empirical realities fill in the void and renders the myths to simply be existential security blankets at best and fumbling attempts at explaining the unexplainable at worst. On second thought, maybe mistaking them for historical truth is a bigger problem. But mythological and religious explanations for our existence remain powerful forces throughout human societies. It seems they can’t be killed. And science is looked upon with deep suspicion and even scorn despite its high levels of success in improving our understanding of our nature at it deepest levels.
One suggested explanation for this epistemological split is that science doesn’t rely on stories to transmit information whereas the mytho-poetic framework does. In the latter case, the narrative framework of myth and religion limits the ability to apprehend and analyze information that is encountered outside of its own narrative boundaries. Science also has limitations, but it also takes into account those limitations and it attempts to correct for its own shortcomings as a system of data collection and interpretation. Therefore it has been more successful in improving the human condition, but possibly less successful at addressing deeply felt human needs for connection and meaning.
Enter Carl Sagan, one of the most ambitious and successful public relations spokesperson for science in our time. What he does in his classic book Cosmos is bridge the gap between story telling and scientific explanation by relating science-as-story to make it more relatable to your average person on the street.
Every story needs a beginning so the obvious starting point for a history of science is with the Big Bang. Sagan was an astrophysicist so there is a heavy emphasis on outer space and Earth’s place in the totality of everything. As it turns out, the sun we revolve around is a star smaller than average and it should humble us to know that Earth is only a small fraction of the size of the sun. Other topics covered are the definition of light years and how they explain why it is currently impossible to travel out of our galaxy, the Voyager probes sent to explore other planets like Saturn and Jupiter, the existence of black holes, and the search for extraterrestrial life especially in relation to the SETI program that Sagan was a part of.
Going in the other direction, Sagan explains the structures of molecules and atoms, the breaking apart of which leads to smaller and smaller subatomic particles all the way down to quarks and what may be beyond those if we ever get that far. While humans are not at the center of the cosmos, and it is extremely short sighted to think that we are, we do hold some kind of undefined place in a vast expanse that, as far as we know, is both infinitely small and infinitely large at the same time, extending in all directions at once. The limits of everything are far beyond the comprehension of our tiny little brains which have evolved as a mechanism for survival, not for accuracy or truth.
While humans may not be the center of everything, we are the center of humanity and so far, we are the only creatures we know of that would be considered of higher intelligence. I know the cynics out there will scoff at that idea in the face of massive amounts of human stupidity we confront on a daily basis, but Carl Sagan wasn’t that much of a pessimist. In fact, he celebrates humanity despite all of its faults. His exploration of the human race begins with an analysis of DNA and the theory that a comet crashing into Earth spread stardust across the world that eventually became the building block of all organic life.
Through the course of evolution, humans developed language and abstract reasoning which led to mytho-poetic explanations of physical phenomena. Rather than condemning early humans for being primitive, superstitious, and pre-scientific, he actual lauds them as being the first scientists because they tried to use reason to explain empirical observations. When ancient people looked at the constellations and saw hunters, lions, bears, and fish in the patterns of stars, they were trying to explain what they saw. And that kind of inquiry and explanation is the foundation of science. Likewise medieval astrologers became the first astronomers and alchemy evolved into the science of chemistry. Rationalists in our day can dismiss these things as naive occultism and pseudoscience, but Sagan gives credit where credit is due. Along with these pseudosciences came great advances in mathematics and medicine while great scientists like Newton, and Copernicus came directly out of these practices. Sagan presents the history of science and the rise of complex cultural systems as keys to understanding who we are as a species.
Some critics have dismissed Carl Sagan because they believe he gave too much attention to speculation and imagination. But Cosmos sufficiently counters this claim, especially in the way that Sagan writes about contacting extraterrestrial life. Such an endeavor is not just about where to look for life outside of Earth, but also about how to look for it. It is only through speculation about what we don’t know that we can begin to address problems like how to communicate, what to do in case other life forms are either friendly or hostile, or whether we can even recognize another life form if we find one. While the chances are statistically high that some other life form, possibly even an intelligent life form, exists somewhere in the multitude of galaxies, chances are just as high that such lfe forms would not resemble us in any way whatsoever. This is because they would have adapted to a different set of environmental conditions.
Sagan also argues that imagination is a necessary component of science because that is the most effective way of questioning threats to our existence. If we can imagine contacting an extraterrestrial life form that turns out to be hostile, we can hopefully predict how to deal with it beforehand. Also imagining a nuclear war should be sufficiently scary enough to make people take precautions against having one. And yet, politicians and businessmen around the world have made no strides towards nuclear disarmament. Sagan writes that the search for life outside Earth and its eventually discovery may be the only thing that can unite all of humanity in a way that would prevent us from destroying ourselves once and for all.
But he isn’t entirely optimistic either; when looking at the European conquests and the way those explorers reacted to their discovery of indigenous peoples, the results were violent and disastrous subjugation. We could be dumb enough to do the same thing to other life forms or, even worse, contact could result in them doing the same to us. His pessimism doesn’t stop there. Sagan writes about how science began to flourish in ancient Greece on the island of Ios, but when the standards of living increased, the intellectuals took an unfortunate turn towards mysticism and religion that almost entirely killed off scientific inquiry. Something similar happened with Mediterranean Muslims during the Middle Ages. The Muslims were once at the forefront of science, philosophy, and education. But when scientists made discoveries that contradicted things written in The Holy Qu’ran, Islamic fundamentalists turned on them and banished science and Aristotelian logic. With the current rise of religious fundamentalism and nationalistic bigotry on the right and anti-science attitudes in the social justice movements of the left, we are in danger of falling back into another Dark Ages. So far AI and digital technology don’t appear to be helping us in developing a more rational human society. These speculations relate back to science because it is through the imagination that we can contemplate possible scenarios for the future and hopefully save ourselves from the mutual destruction which appears to be the direction we are headed in now. Speculation in the service of science actually is part of the scientific process so long as it addresses problems derived from empirical data.
If Carl Sagan intended to bring science to the masses by writing about it as a story, he is only partially successful, at least from the standpoint of a conventional story telling narrative structure. He tends to wander from one subject to another in a non-linear fashion. He writes chapters that start in outer space and then take you directly to medieval politics or theoretical discussions on quantum mechanics. The pieces don’t always join together in ways that make sense. In the chapter on Ionian science and its degeneration into Pythagorean and Platonic mysticism, he transitions into an unrelated discussion on astrophysics and the limitations of our current technology. In another chapter, out of the blue he brings up whales and then abruptly transitions into a discussion about the challenges of interstellar space travel. At a distance, you could maybe draw a connection between our inability to understand the whales’ systems of communication with the potential problems we might have in communicating with life in other galaxies, but the connection isn’t firmly made in the text and may not even be Sagan’s intended meaning.
As such, if story telling is Sagan’s intention, this book works more like a collection of short stories than a novel. One reason conventional stories work is that they draw the reader into a series of related cause-and-effect events that culminate in the resolution of a conflict. The action is driven by a character who, in in some good stories, may embody abstract ideas, moral clarity, or exemplary behavior. But science, in its pursuit of ultimate truth, deals in abstractions, methods, logic, observation, probabilities, and other things that are taxing to the minds of people with little interest in technical discussions about the messiness of reality and our inevitable shortcomings in comprehending it as a whole. There are reasons why science is difficult to communicate using mythological language and those reasons are part of the problem that P.R. people for science face in a world full of non-scientific thinkers. But that doesn’t mean that Sagan doesn’t clearly articulate the ideas about science he wishes to communicate. He does and he does so better than other authors on this sbject. There is no reason to dismiss this book even though by literary standards it is flawed. If this issue concerns you, then Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Everything might be worth checking out; it is basically the same book, but handled by a writer with more of a literary flair and his characteristic dark but warm sense of humor.
Cosmos is a treatise on entry level science. Its intention is to arouse curiosity in the mainstream because the mainstream is so preoccupied with entertainment over anything else. Since Carl Sagan, and the TV show that accompanies this book, have made inroads into pop culture, it succeeds at least on that level. It’s clearly written and easy to follow, but probably the best audience for this is young people who don’t know much about science and want to learn more but don’t know where to start. For people with more education and scientific knowledge, there won’t be much here that they haven’t already learned. For what it is, it’s a great book but if you have an undergraduate level of scientific knowledge it’s little more than refresher material. On the other hand, it serves as a reminder that the scientific quest to learn the ultimate truth about everything ny using sound and consistent methods is a large part of what makes us human.
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