Yes, the Cosmos I’m referring to this week is Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Specifically I’m talking about the book because I just finished reading it for the first time. One of those backlog items that I’ve had around for years, basically from when I first watched the corresponding show almost a decade ago. It was nice to read the book now because apparently I had forgotten a lot of what the show talked about.
I know it technically hasn’t been 40 years since the book and TV series came out, it’s been 39, but I figure that’s close enough to make the claim. I suspect that come next year, there will be a bunch of articles doing the official 40 year anniversary, and they will probably talk about some of the points I want to bring up today.
As I already said, I either forgot a lot about what the show was about, or some things just didn’t register the same way they did with the book because times have changed a lot since then. I do know that the book and TV shows have differences, but I feel like if I watched the show again it would also land differently.
I remembered most of the science bits, but I also learned a lot of it in school, so that’s not much of a surprise. The only part that was a good refresher was on how different elements are actually made and how they come to be on planets like ours. I also remember the section on how many recent “discoveries” were actually found thousands of years ago, but all of that knowledge was lost due to religious suppression. Even now, just thinking about how much was lost due to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is sad and frustrating. That had a big impact on me the first time around and the book added even more flavor and details.
In terms of things that stood out to me this time around, there are three areas that are worth bringing up.
First, there is a big emphasis on how important it is for the human race to do more things in space. This probably seemed more obvious at the time because back then there was a lot more momentum for doing space projects. That momentum has slackened significantly in the last 40 years, so you don’t hear about the few projects that do exist much unless something novel happens. As such, I’m sure Mr. Sagan would be a little disappointed in how things have gone.
What has happened in the last decade is that private industry has tried to make up for the lack of progress in the public sector (due to lack of funding). Obviously the two you hear the most about are SpaceX and Blue Origin. What is interesting about this development is that, though the technological advances have been amazing, there has been a tremendous amount of backlash against the people running these companies, and subsequently a backlash against the companies themselves and the money being spent on them. The general theme of these criticisms is that the money could be better spent on fixing problems that have more immediate impact on the world we already live on. Other criticisms stem from the founders of these companies being awful people.
It seems very likely that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and others in this industry were inspired by books like Cosmos that pushed the idea that going to space was important for the human race. But was it really the right message when it seems to sacrifice the well-being of Earth in exchange? Maybe not so much. I don’t really have a dog in this fight since I fundamentally believe that people have the right to do what they want with their money, and the technology coming out of these endeavours is objectively good for the world at large, but I do think that the money could be better spent and I would rather see more money put into the public sector where there’s no profit incentive for something so important. I can’t help but feel that Carl Sagan’s dream of humans reaching the stars has been somewhat corrupted by people who have the means to do so, but not the right motives. They come across as rather myopic on the state of the world.
Second, there is a surprising amount of doomsday worries considering how positive the rest of the book is. It shouldn’t be that surprising given the book was written during the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was still a viable threat. But what’s interesting about it now is that we have sort of come back around in a circle where it might be a viable threat again. After the collapse of the USSR, there were a few decades where we were actively working to fix the problem of having enough nukes to destroy the world hundreds of times over, and no one really gave it another thought. I know I certainly didn’t growing up.
But now, while we are certainly not at the same level of threat as then, people are starting to worry again. We have a lot of unstable leaders right now who have access to those weapons, and it’s not a stretch to think that any one of them could start a war because they need to show the world who is the most insecure about themselves. One would like to hope that cooler heads would prevail and stop that from happening, but we just don’t know.
It stuck out to me how many times the book gives the sentiment of, “it will be incredible when we realize this monumental achievement, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first.” The book even spends most of a whole chapter talking about nuclear weapons and what it would do to us should they be used. It’s like, I get why it is important to know these things, but it seems out of place with the rest of the book. Still, somebody has to tell it, so I’m actually glad it’s in there. It drives home the point that we as humans are capable of amazing things, but we’re also really dumb about ensuring our own survival.
And speaking of our survival, that leads into the third point, which is that we have done shockingly little to maintain this little planet we live on over the last 40 years. What’s sad about it is that you read books like this and you realize that we have known for decades what we need to do. While Mr. Sagan didn’t call it climate change as we do now, there is a big emphasis in the book about how we need to move towards cleaner sources of energy and do less to destroy the parts of the environment that keep things in balance. Yet here we are, decades later, and very little has actually been done.
Granted, I don’t expect the whole world to just listen to one man and say, “sure, we should do that.” But it wasn’t just him that was ignored, literally everyone has been ignored. For example, there has been some information going around in the last week or so about a study Exxon did back in the early 80s, shortly after this book came out, where the researchers accurately predicted what today’s CO2 levels and average planet temperatures would be. They also mentioned just how bad that would be for the environment. But of course, Exxon being Exxon, did nothing to try to combat that. Making money off of cheap fuel is more important, the environment be damned.
It hurts reading about these warnings being given decades ago, and having to live through the present where it might be too late to fix the problem. Perhaps it is true that any civilization who is smart enough to contemplate the Cosmos is bound to destroy itself before it can actually do something about it.
Anyway, Cosmos is still a good read and still just as poignant as it was back in 1980 when it came out. It’ll be interesting to see where we are 40 years from now and what we will have learned by then. Unless, of course, we destroy ourselves first.