Staring at Stars- The Sagan Series Anthology (Documentary)

It's a muggy July night. You've fallen asleep on the couch. You've suddenly woken up, startled, disoriented. The TV is on but there's no sound. You've made an effort to understand what you're seeing. Two ghostly white figures in overalls and helmets are dancing softly. They're small and strange jumping movements that propel them upwards or through barely perceptible clouds of dust but something is wrong they take too long to come down loaded as they are they seem to fly a little you rub your eyes but the dreamlike picture persists of all The events surrounding the landing of the Apollo 11 on the moon on July 20, 1969.

My most vivid memory is its unreal quality. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin shuffled across the moving gray and dusty surface of the Earth, the Moon large in their sky, while Michael Collins, now the moon's own film, orbited above. them in solitary vigil yes, it was an astonishing technological achievement and a triumph for the United States yes, the astronauts showed death-defying courage yes, as Armstrong said when he first descended, this was a historic step for the human species , but if you turn off the game purchase between Mission Control and the Sea of ​​Tranquility with its deliberately mundane and routine chatter and scare you on that black and white television monitor you could glimpse that we, the humans, had entered the wrong key , myth and legend, once we rose towards the solar system for a few years then we hurried back why what happened what really was Apollo it is easy to imagine schemes of historical causality there were many possible historical paths our ancestors walked from the east of Africa to Novaya Zemlya and Ayers Rock and Patagonia hunted elephants with stone spearheads walked on the moon a decade after entering space it is beyond our power to predict future catastrophic events they have a way of sneaking up on us and surprising us without knowing that Your own life or your bands or even your species may be old to a restless few drawn by a longing they can hardly articulate or understand towards undiscovered lands and new worlds, each victory is only the prelude to another and, although limits can be set , rational hope our particular scheme of causality has led us to a modest and rudimentary

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, although in many ways heroic. of explorations, but it is far less than what could have been and what could one day be, it could be a familiar progression that occurs on many worlds, a newly formed planet spins placidly around its star, life slowly forms a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures, evolves, intelligence emerges, which is the least to some extent confers enormous survival value and then technology is invented in an instant, they create a world-altering invention' as some planetary civilizations see their way to through the established limits on what can and should not be done and pass safely through the time of danger to others.' not so lucky or sapru will not perish this is one of the reasons why in the long term astronomical perspective there is something truly epic right now this is the first moment in the history of our planet in which any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to We humans have already precipitated species extinctions on a scale unprecedented since the end of the Cretaceous period, but only in the last decade has the magnitude of these extinctions become clear and has been raised the possibility, but in our ignorance.

Because of the interrelationships of life on Earth, we may be endangering our long future. Of course, we must keep our planet habitable, not on a leisurely time scale of centuries or millennia, but urgently on a time scale of decades. or even years. This will involve changes in government and industry. in ethics, in economics and in religion, we have never done anything like this before, certainly not on a global scale, it may be too difficult for us, dangerous technologies, they may be too widespread, corruption may be too widespread, there may be too many contesting ethnic groups, nation-states and ideologies so that the right kind of global change is instituted;

However, the new humans also have a history of making lasting social changes that almost everyone thought impossible, often, despite our diversity, despite endemic hatreds, we have united to face a common enemy. our influence on the future is high, Justin, these days we seem much more willing to recognize the dangers before us than we were a decade ago, the newly recognized dangers threaten us all equally, no one can say how it will turn out here, but This we can also note the first time that a species has been able to travel to the planets and

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by sailing on the beak in the sea.

We feel the movement of a breeze. Let's consider again that pale blue dot we've been talking about. Let's imagine that. You look at it carefully, imagine that you are looking at the dot for a certain period of time, and then try to convince yourself that God created the entire universe for one of the ten million species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now let's go a step further, imagine that everything was made only for a single shade of that species or gender or ethnic or religious subdivision. We can recognize here a deficiency in some serious circumstances in our ability to understand the world.

Characteristically, we seem forced to project our own nature. about nature, man in his arrogance believes himself to be a great work worthy of the interposition of a deity Darwin Rotella graphically in his most humble notebook and I think it is more true to consider it created from animals clothing whoa we are johnny-come-lately we live in the corners cosmic we emerged from the microbes in the dung apes we are our cousins ​​our thoughts and feelings are not completely under our own control and on top of all this we are making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves the trap door under our Los Feet open and we find ourselves in a bottomless free fall.

If it takes a little myth and ritual to get through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand that we long to be here for a purpose, even though despite much self-deception none of us are? evident the meaning of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage we are the custodians of the meaning of life we ​​cry for a father who cares for us forgives us our mistakes saves us from our childhood mistakes but knowledge is Preferable to ignorance by far, it is much better to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring faith.

Modern science has been a journey into the unknown with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our common sense. Intuitions can be wrong. Our preferences don't count. We don't live in. a privileged frame of reference if we long for some cosmic purpose then we will find ourselves already cold like children we fear the dark the unknown we are worried about anything could be out there ironically it is our destiny to live in the dark go out towards the earth in any direction you wish choose and After an initial flash of knowing that you are surrounded by darkness punctuated only here and there by faint, distant

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, even after we have grown up, the darkness retains its power to frighten us and that is why there are those who say we shouldn't ask too. up close who else could be living in that darkness it is better not to know they say that there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way of this immense multitude it could be that our monotonous Sun is the only one with an inhabited planet maybe perhaps the origin of life or intelligence are extremely unlikely or perhaps civilizations arise all the time but become extinct as soon as evil wars appear here and there scattered throughout space perhaps there are worlds like ours that other beings look at and wonder like we do about Who else lives in the dark?

Life is a comparative rarity. You can examine dozens of worlds and discover that only one of them has life arising, evolving, and persisting. If we Youman ever go to those worlds, it will be because of a nation or a consortium. one of them believes that it is beneficial for him or for the human species, in our time we crossed the solar system and sent four ships to the stars, but we continue looking for inhabitants, life looks for life, not because Paulo conveyed confidence. energy and breath, the vision that captured the world's imagination, inspired optimism about technology and enthusiasm for the future, if we could fly to the moon, as many have wondered what else we were capable of, we may have found that perspective just in time, just as our technology threatens the habitability of our world, whatever the reason we first created the Apollo program, however caught up in Cold War nationalism and instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend. the unexpected final gift of Apollo, we had an expansive race in the 60s and 70s, you might have thought, as I did then, that our species would be on Mars before the century was out, but instead we have pushed the robots inward, we have supported. away from the planets and stars I still wonder if it's a lack of nerve or a sign of maturity maybe it's the most we could reasonably have expected in some ways it's surprising that it was possible we send a dozen humans a week - long excursions into the moon missions that returned a wealth of data but nothing of practical short-term value, or at least not much, lifted the human spirit even as they illuminated us about our place in the universe a highly visible program that affects our view of ourselves could clarify the fragility of our planetary environment and the common danger and responsibility of all nations and peoples on Earth there is more to it than spaceflight speaks to something deep within us, many of us, if not all, a fellow scientist tells me. about a recent trip to the New Guinea Highlands where he visited a Stone Age culture barely contacted by Western civilization they didn't know about wrist watches soft drinks frozen food but they knew about Apollo 11 they knew that the unions had walked on the moon they knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.

Future-oriented projects that, despite their political difficulties, can only be completed in some distant decade. Our continued reminders that there will be a future that will take hold in other worlds with sprues in our ears that were more than arrangements or Serbians or metal tongues where units, meanwhile, people everywhere were hanging on to grasp the idea that now We have understood something that no one who has lived before that euphoria ever understood, especially in times for the scientists involved, perceptible to almost everyone, it spreads through society, it bounces off the walls and comes back to us, it encourages us to address problems in other fields.

If we are to solve hitherto intractable social problems, this will help stimulate a new generation of scientists. The more science that appears in the media, especially if the methods are described as false conclusions and implications, the healthier I think society will be. There are many housework to do. here on Earth and our commitment to it must be firm, but we are the type of species that needs a border for fundamental biological reasons. Every time humanity strives, it receives a solvent of productive vitality that can sustain it for centuries. Yuri Romanenko upon returning to Earth after what was then the longest space flight in history said that the cosmos is a magnet once you've been there, all you can think about is how to get back.

Could the Milky Way be full of life and intelligence? The world calls to the worlds while we. on earth we are alive at the critical moment when we decide to listen for the first time our species has discovered a way to communicate through the darkness to transcend immense distances no means of communication is faster or cheaper or goes further it is called radio now we are in an unprecedented time listening at scale to radio signals from possible other civilizations in the depths of space this search is called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI Princeton SETI let me describe how far we have come the first SETI program was conducted by Frank Drake his great achievement was show that modern technology is fully capable of listening to signals from hypothetical civilizations on the planets of other stars meanwhile the technology for detection has become cheaper sensitivity continues to improve the scientific respectability of SETI has continued to grow but it is our fear of darkness which repels the idea of ​​beingsAliens worry us, we object, it's too expensive, some of us say, but in its most complete modern technological expression it costs less than one attack helicopter a year, we will never understand what some of us say, but because the message gets across by radio I and must have radiophysics Radio astronomy and radiotechnology income the laws of nature are the same everywhere so science itself provides means and language of communication even between very different types of beings as long as both have science Throughout human history, some of us say that advanced civilizations have ruined slightly more backward civilizations, but malevolent aliens, if they exist, will not discover our existence because we listen to the search programs, they only receive, they do not send, after billions of years of biological evolution.

On your planet and ours, an alien civilization cannot be at the same technological level, unless there have been humans for over 20,000 centuries, but we have only had radio for about a century. If alien civilizations are behind us, they are probably too far behind to have radio and if they are ahead of us they are probably too far ahead of us. Think about the technical advances in our world over the last few centuries. us technologically difficult for her impossible what could seem magical to us It could be for them trivially easy, we could communicate today in much of the galaxy, they should be able to do it much better if they existed. we were hunters and gatherers the frontier was everywhere we were limited only by the land and the ocean and the sky the open road still calls softly to our little globe like the madhouse of those hundred billion worlds that we cannot even establish our own planetary home So that, divided by rivalries and hatreds, we can venture to the space when we are ready to settle even in the other closest planetary systems, we will have changed, the simple passage of so many generations will have changed us, necessity will have changed us.

You are an adaptable species, we will not be the ones who reach Alpha Centauri and other nearby stars, it will be a species very similar to us, but with more strengths and fewer weaknesses, more confident, with a vision of the future, capable and prudent for all our defects . Despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness, what new wonders unimaginable in our time we have wrought in generation after generation, how far our nomadic species will have wandered by the end of the next century and into the next millennium, our remote descendants will be safe and sound.

Spread across many worlds across the solar system and beyond, they will be unified by their common heritage, by their respect for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in the entire universe who come of the Earth, they will look up and strive. To find the blue dot in your skies, you will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was. How dangerous our childhood was. How humble our beginnings were. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. But I feel like any other morning before.

I wonder what my life will be like in this goal. Cars move at half a mile per hour. I started looking at the passengers and saying goodbye. Can you tell me what was really special about me? everyone turning to the class I don't remember taking care of our soul, stop Mazel, there are no arrows in the street. Oh, say well, it's burning to the ground on the corner and this was born at home and it was great and great, it was just our baby because I left, no, I'm just calling and I have no idea, scream, that was cold, it just was, now it's over for me and everything is coming to an end.