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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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There's a scene in Sagan's Cosmos where he's exploring the possibilities of life elsewhere. He's in the Ship of the Imagination, looking around at various potentials. He runs across one planet teeming with a civilization, from orbit it had even more lights and connections that our own at night. And then the lights suddenly go out. He discusses how even thriving life can suddenly die and speculates on a few reasons why this one might have, like resources or war or whatever. Summary from memory, I have no idea which episode it's in.
In reality it wouldn't be a sudden disappearance, but a longer decay. The lights shutting off was just to illustrate how easy it is to lose something assumed to be permanent. I'd also recommend the beginning of Revolution to get that same surreal feeling, although the rest of the series was blah.
Ah, Cosmos, I remember watching that when I still believed people were creatures of knowledge and advancement. We'll never know any of those things cause we spent the last 50 years prioritizing profit over all else. It didnt have to be like this.
Carl Sagan
Sagan always said we had the potential to be better, but he was also concerned it was an uphill climb. Where Carlin got angrier with age, I think Sagan would just have been disappointed in us. Especially in the fall back into ignorance and superstition, something else he warned about in The Demon-Haunted World. Every quote you can find from that book is profound, but this one is eerily hard hitting:
“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Just read it a couple of months ago and it was these little nuggets that kept hitting me hard leaving me like what's-his-face when he saw the statue of liberty in planet of the apes. We had a nice thing going.