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Posts tagged ‘Carl Sagan’

Nov 3

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Fall ’08 Reading List

I’ve compiled quite a list for the rest of this year. I’ve actually finished a few of these but I wanted to write them down so that I can keep the list up to date. Not that anyone really cares what I’m reading, but I go back to these lists to find conscious and unconscious themes in my interests. I’m still tackling a lot of religious themes and also took a detour last month to read a few books by Barack Obama.

I also decided to read Mahabharata from beginning to end. I’ve read a greatly abridged version but the full version will probably take 2 years to finish. The unabridged translation of the Mahabharata contains 74,000 verses, long prose passages, and about 1.8 million words in total. Put another way, it is roughly ten times the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It’s going to take me a while. I’ve also being pulled back into physics and I have picked up a few new interesting books. Of course, I’m still making an unsuccessful effort to learn Hindi – and, as always, I am re-reading some old favorites like Catcher and Pale Blue Dot. Anyway, this is the list.

I’m also going to try to get through a few Teaching Company courses by the end of the year:

Sep 9

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Pale Blue Dot

Sep 9

Awe, Humility, and Hope

The Zeitgeist is whispering in a new language and something strange is in the air. Something new is trying to be born. Perhaps it is only my experience – it may only be in America – but there is definitely a new awareness of our place in the universe that is slowly emerging. Friends and family that have long been concerned with daily, all-too-human issues and struggles have recently looked to the stars with a little bit more wonder. It’s as if a new level of consciousness is dawning on the planet: a realization that we are a part of the planet and it is a part of us. Even church sermons have begun shifting from discussions of evil to discussions of awe and wonder over how infinite, amazing, and beautiful the universe really is. What is going on?

I do hope that I am right – that there is a new sense of wonder in the air. The promised age of Aquarius in the new millennium may be finally awakening from it’s much too long slumber, asleep from the times when the goddess ruled the Earth. A time of peace and harmony. The images coming back from the Hubble telescope and from our missions from Mars and the Moon and slowly taking hold of our collective psyche. For the first time in history, industrialized nations are taking seriously the impact we have on our planet.

The book 2010, by Arthur C. Clarke, contains a hint of this sort of emerging consciousness. After receiving the message, “all these worlds are yours except Europa attempt no landing there. Use them together use them in peace”, from an unknown source (what does the monolith represent?) Dr. Heyword Floyd says, “We were only the tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease, and a warning, from the landlord.” It is these two realizations: 1) that there is something in the universe much larger and more incomprehensible that we previously imagined, and 2) we as a species are not permanent, we are here at the leisure of the universe. It would take only one large rock from space to destroy all traces of our existence.

From Contact, by Carl Sagan, the main character Ellie Ann Arroway says, “I was part of something wonderful, something that changed me forever; a vision of the Universe that tells us undeniable how tiny, and insignificant, and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not, that none of us are alone. I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and the hope, but… that continues to be my wish.”

That continues to be my wish, as well.

Aug 17

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Carl Sagan on Hinduism

I’ve written before about how influential Carl Sagan was in my childhood. Not only his views of science and philosophy but also his views on religion. My interest in Hinduism goes far back into my elementary school years when I discovered that there was a religion that had such a enormous vision of cosmos.

I had to find out more. Rather than the universe being only a few thousand years old (as I had learned in church), Hindus believed that the universe was billions and billions of years old – and that there were an infinite number of universes previous to this one! That was a view of the world that truly encompassed the scale of a divine creator; not a small god that had only been around for a few years, interested only in the affairs of a few, special people on one small planet. I had discovered that there was another way of thinking.

It was Carl Sagan that helped me first awaken that sense of complete awe at the scale of universe. Though Sagan was an agnostic, I get the feeling if he were to have chosen a religion, Hinduism would have been it. Here is the clip from Cosmos that I saw when I was a kid. His sense of child-like wonder and fascination is as infectious today as it was then. Enjoy!

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Nov 20

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Cosmos 25th Anniversary

When Carl Sagan died, one of my heroes was lost. After a two year battle with bone marrow cancer, Sagan died at age 62. His influence on my generation is hard to measure. As a kid, I remember Cosmos coming on PBS for the first time. I begged my parents to let me stay up late and I watched every episode. At night I dreamed of going to the places that his starship of the imagination went – off to distant places, light years away.

Sagan’s dream was to go to the stars. He believed it was humanity’s inescapable destiny to leave the Earth and travel to the stars. Sagan recognized that our world changed when the Apollo astronauts snapped the first picture of our planet from the surface of the moon. However, even though our destiny may be to escape the gravity of our home world, Sagan warned that a much different, much darker destiny may await us, as well. He remained cautiously optimistic about our future. Read more