Carl Sagan on Extraterrestrials

If you look at timescales, you realize that our civilization is the most backward civilization in the galaxy that could communicate at all because we’ve just invented radio telescopes just a few decades ago. We had not the ghost of a chance of communicating with anybody else. So If we receive a message, it can’t be from anybody less capable than we, because anybody less capable can’t communicate at all. So it has to be somebody much in advance of us, and maybe as much in advance of us as we are in advance of the ants, say, or the worms.

You, Carl Sagan, scientist, astronomer, enlighten me. You think that indeed there may be some sort of intelligence out there?

May, surely. Surely may. There is, we now realize, an enormous number of planets. A range of planetary systems around the nearby stars. So there’s a lot of potential abodes for life. That’s one thing. Then there’s the question of organic matter. The carbon-rich complex molecules that are essential for the kind of life we know about, are fantastically abundant. They litter the universe. We see them in asteroids, in comets, in the moons in the outer solar system, and even in the cold dark spaces between the stars, so the stuff of life is everywhere. Then there’s time. There are billions of years for biological evolution on all those worlds, there are many worlds that are much older than ours. You put those together, lots of places, lots of organic matter, lots of time, and it seems very hard to believe that our paltry little planet is the only one that’s inhabited.

You know, there’s a phrase you use about the earth people us, we, are so benighted. “The Earth is the ghetto of the universe.” We’re the ghetto of the universe.

Well in an extremely backward and obscure part of the Milky Way galaxy. We’re thirty thousand light years from the center of the galaxy. We’re in the galactic boondocks. This whole galaxy is only one of probably hundreds of billions of other galaxies, a useful calibration of our place in the universe.

There’s also religion and science.

There is a tendency in both schools of thought to think that they have a corner on the truth. I mean, a way to look at it is the following; science and religion on some level are after the same thing. Take the question of our origins. Both science and religion attempt to approach this question. But the religions all contradict each other, so they can’t all be right. The Judeo-Christian Islamic religion holds that the world is about six thousand years old; you just count up the “begats” in the Old Testament. It’s very clear, six thousand years old. The Hindus have an infinitely old universe with an infinite number of creations and destructions of the whole universe. Now those two major religions can’t both be right. How do you tell which is right and which is wrong? The only way is to appeal to the natural world around us, and the natural world around us shows that the Earth, for example, is about four point six billion years old and nothing like six thousand years old. So a literal reading of the Bible simply is a mistake; I mean it’s just wrong; it’s just wrong. As a work of science, it is flawed, it’s the science of the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. We’ve learned something since then.

Well you quote Einstein. The cosmic religious feeling. He is religious in that sense, is the strongest noblest mode of a scientific research, so there’s a religion of sorts that Einstein believed in.

Right, but it’s very different from most people’s view of religion. Einstein talked about God, but for Einstein God was little more than the sum total of the laws of the universe. There was no hint of intervention in daily life, of the efficacy of prayer, of life after death, or any of those accoutrements of the Judeo-Christian Islamic religion.