Now, I’ve not shown you images of our own tiny world, nor did Thomas Wright. He wrote, “To what you have said about my having left out my own habitation in my scheme of the universe, having traveled so far into infinity as but to lose sight of the Earth, I think I may justly answer, as Aristotle did when Alexander, looking over a map of the world, inquired of him for the city of Macedon, ’tis said the philosopher told the prince that the place he sought was much too small to be there taken notice of and was not without sufficient reason omitted. The system of the Sun,” Wright goes on, “compared but with a very minute part of the visible creation takes up so small a portion of the known universe that in a very finite view of the immensity of space I judged the seat of the Earth to be of very little consequence.”

This perspective provides a kind of calibration of where we are. I don’t think it should be too discouraging. It is the reality of the universe we live in.

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. It’s after an exercise such as this that many people conclude that the religious sensibility is inevitable. Edward Young, in the eighteenth century, said, “An undevout astronomer is mad,” from which I suppose it is essential that we all declare our devotion at risk of being adjudged mad.But devotion to what?

All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lovely universe. There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life. For example, we’ve talked about stars in the late stages of their evolution. We’ve talked about supernova explosions. There are much vaster explosions. There are explosions at the centers of galaxies from what are called quasars. There are other explosions, maybe small quasars. In fact, the Milky Way Galaxy itself has had a set of explosions from its center, some 30,000 light-years away. And if, as I will speculate later, life and perhaps even intelligence is a cosmic commonplace, then it must follow that there is massive destruction, obliteration of whole planets, that routinely occurs, frequently, throughout the universe.

Well, that is a different view than the traditional Western sense of a deity carefully taking pains to promote the wellbeing of intelligent creatures. It’s a very different sort of conclusion that modern astronomy suggests. There is a passage from Tennyson that comes to mind: “I found Him in the shining of the stars, I marked Him in the flowering of His fields.” So far pretty ordinary. But, Tennyson goes on, “In His ways with men I find him not. Why is all around us here as if some lesser god had made the world but had not force to shape it as He would?”

To me personally, the first line, “I found Him in the shining of the stars,” is not entirely apparent. It depends on who the Him is. But surely there is a message in the heavens that the finiteness not just of life but of whole worlds, in fact of whole galaxies, is a bit antithetical to the conventional theological views in the West, although not in the East. And this then suggests a broader conclusion. And that is the idea of an immortal Creator. By definition, as Ann Druyan has pointed out, an immortal Creator is a cruel god because He, never having to face the fear of death, creates innumerable creatures who do. Why should He do that? If He’s omniscient He could be kinder and create immortals, secure from the danger of death. He sets about creating a universe in which at least many parts of it and perhaps the universe as a whole, dies. And in many myths, the one possibility the gods are most anxious about is that humans will discover some secret of immortality or even, as in the myth of the Tower of Babel, for example, attempt to stride the high heavens. There is a clear imperative in Western religion that humans must remain small and mortal creatures. Why? It’s a little bit like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it. And there are other challenges to the conventional religions from even the most casual look at the sort of cosmos I have presented to you.

Let me quote a passage from Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason. Paine was an Englishman who played a major role in both the American and French Revolutions. “From whence,” Paine asks, “From whence then could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on His protection, should quit the care of all the rest and come to die in our world because, they say, one man and one woman ate an apple? And on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a Redeemer?”

Paine is saying that we have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.

Now, we can say, “Well, that’s just because the right words weren’t available back when the first Jewish or Christian or Islamic holy books were written.” But clearly that’s not the problem; it is certainly possible in the beautiful metaphors in these books to describe something like the Galaxy and the universe, and it isn’t there. It is a god of one small world; a problem, I believe, that theologians have not adequately addressed.

Now, I don’t propose that it is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it’s important to understand how much we do not know. There is an enormous amount we do not know; there is a tiny amount that we do. But what we do understand brings us face to face with an awesome cosmos that is simply different from the cosmos of our pious ancestors.

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would he prefer his votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you mentioned in your talk that one of the most important functions in science is to reward those who disprove our most closely held beliefs. Sir, if you were to look ahead two or three or four generations, which of our most closely held beliefs today do you think are the most likely candidates for disproof?

SAGAN: Maybe the belief that challenges our most closely held beliefs. Prophecy is a lost art. I have no way of doing that. If I could do that, think of the enormous effort we could save. The question flies in the very face of what I was just saying about how the most obvious points, the things we’re absolutely sure of, may turn out to be wrong. So I am not immune to that fallibility and frailty. Let me give another example. It’s the middle of the nineteenth century. The leading futurologist— although the word didn’t exist then; it’s a terrible word— was Jules Verne. He was asked to project a century ahead. What would be the means of transportation, the most exotic means of transportation, in the middle of the twentieth century? He then did whatever he did, looked into his crystal ball metaphorically speaking, and then gave the following conclusion: by 1950 there would be Victorian living rooms with lots of red velvet plush, I imagine, in the gondolas of great airships (they were called, but essentially dirigibles) which would cross the Atlantic Ocean in no more than a week. And people said, “Whew! That Jules Verne, he sure is farseeing. Who could have thought of that?”And he was grossly off. Why was he off? Was he stupid? Was he not a good futurologist? No. He didn’t foresee heavier-than-air aircraft, nor did anybody else. The view in the middle of the nineteenth century was that it was impossible. And in just the same way, whatever I would tell you, where we would be in space or something like that, is bound to be, through the arguments on the idea that unless we destroy ourselves, overtaken by scientific ideas and technological developments that I haven’t a ghost of a chance of foreseeing. So forgive me for not being able to answer your question.

QUESTION: Thank you for your talk.
I just wanted to challenge the idea that the reward system in science is essentially different from any other system. A person who successfully challenges the emperor gets the greatest rewards. An entrepreneur who successfully displaces some other technology or some other entrepreneur gets the greatest rewards. And a scientist who fails to successfully challenge the head of his discipline can see his head rolling, professionally, just as quickly, I think, as the unsuccessful coup d’etat. Thank you.

SAGAN: Thank you. I think you raise a good point; permit me to disagree. There are certainly similarities along the lines that you say and, for example, maybe you remember the novel and television series, Shogun, in which the English sailor, washed ashore in Japan, is brought to meet Tokanaga, the future Shogun, who is very autocratic and authoritarian, hierarchical, as of course all military leaders are. And when he discovers that the Dutch were revolting from their Spanish overlords, he immediately identifies with the Spanish. He never met a Spaniard in his life, but they were in charge, and anybody challenging them must be doing something wrong. The hero then says, “The only mitigating condition is that the upstarts win.” And Tokanaga says “Yes, yes, very true,” and then they are friends. That’s the point you just made. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a reward structure that encouraged the Dutch to revolt against the Spanish. It just means that if they succeed, then they succeed. It’s a tautology. Whereas in science, there is a reward structure from the beginning. It doesn’t mean that if somebody challenges Newton he is immediately rewarded. Einstein had some difficulties with special relativity. His Nobel prize was not even for relativity, it was for the photoelectric effect, because relativity was considered to be worrisome. Nevertheless, there were many scientists who recognized the value of what Einstein said. He was not challenging Isaac Newton; Isaac Newton was dead. The value of what Einstein said was there plain for anyone to see; nobody had thought of it before. As soon as people had worked through the arguments on the idea that simultaneity was a nonsensical idea, many were converted on the spot. I don’t say that everybody was; I don’t say that there weren’t some problems with it, but there is a reward structure built in. And Einstein, just a few years after his 1905 relativity paper, was Full Professor and at the top of his profession.

QUESTION: Did you really say billions and billions of — (Laughter)

SAGAN: Never. Johnny Carson said it. I once saw him put on a wig and a corduroy jacket and pretend to be me, but I no more said it than Sherlock Holmes, in any of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, said “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

QUESTION: I find it a little surprising that you use the words “science”and “truth” together in the same sentence. You said that science doesn’t seek absolute truths, but asympomatically tries to approach truth. I find truth is something that is very anthropocentric, relative to human being at a given time and a given place. I usually think of science more as seeking asymptomatically a better understanding of reality, not of truth.

SAGAN: I won’t quibble on words. There are as many people who argue about the existence of reality as about the existence of truth. I encourage them to debate each other. (Laughter)

QUESTION: If I understand the theory of relativity, the space/time viewpoint, a causal violation should not be able to create a paradox. Do you think we may ever have as much control over space/time geometry as we do over electricity?

SAGAN: That’s an awfully good question and I don’t know the answer. But yes, a topic that is being hotly debated these days in the gravitational physics community is whether producing a paradox is a contradiction, or whether a paradox of the sort you referred to is just something we are going to have to live with. Can effects precede causes, for example. We have a tendency just to throw up our hands in amazement and despair: “What are you talking about? It’s nonsense!” But there are certain sciences that seem to be in a funny way internally consistent with what else we know about physics and which may say effect can precede causes. I don’t guarantee it’s true, but if it is true it’s just another one of those cases where our common sense doesn’t apply everywhere.

QUESTION: Richard Hoagland has recently got hold of some pictures, Hasselblad pictures from NASA, which were taken some twenty years ago of the moon, and he has been describing those in great detail. He gave a talk at Ohio State University a couple of weeks ago and he had video cameras on and they were supposed to have videos available. I wonder if you’ve heard about this and had previous knowledge of . . . .

SAGAN: You forgot to mention what is on those videos.

QUESTION: Structures on the moon.

SAGAN: Richard Hoagland is a fabulist. By the way, it’s not difficult getting hold of the hand-held Hasselblad camera pictures; NASA freely releases them to everybody. These are in the public domain, they’re available to anybody. You don’t have to do something remarkable to get the pictures. The aspect of this story I know best has to do with the so-called Face on Mars. There is a place on Mars called Sidonia, which was photographed in a mission I was deeply involved in, the Viking mission to Mars in 1976. And there is one picture in which along a range of hulking mesas and hillocks, there is what looks very much like a face, about three kilometers across at the base and a kilometer high. It’s flat on the ground, looking up. It has a helmet or a hair-do, depending on how you look at it, it has a nose, a forehead, one eye—the other half is in shadow—pretty eerie looking. You could almost imagine it was done by Praxiteles on a monumental scale. And this gentleman deduces from this that there was a race of ancient Martians. He has dated them, he purports to have deduced when they were around, and it was 500,000 years ago or something like that, when our ancestors were certainly not able to do space flights, and then all sorts of wonderful conclusions are deduced and “we came from Mars”or “guys from other star systems came here and left a statue on Mars and left some of them on Earth.” By the way, all of which fails to explain how it is that humans share 99.6 percent of their active genes with chimpanzees. If we were just dropped here, how come we’re so closely related to them? What is the basis of the argument? How good is it? My standard way of approaching this is to point out that there is an eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon. The eggplant has this ski nose and, “that’s Richard Nixon, I’d know him anywhere.”

What shall we deduce from this eggplant phenomenon? Extraterrestrials messing with our eggplants? A miracle? God is talking to us through the eggplant? Or, that there have been tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of eggplants in history, and they all have funny little knobs, and every now and then there is going to be one that by accident looks like a human face. Humans are very good at recognizing human faces. I think clearly the latter. Now let’s go to Mars. Thousands of low, hilly mesas have all sorts of features. Here’s one that looks a little like a human face. When you bring out the contrast in the shadowed area it doesn’t look as good. Now, we’re very good at picking out human faces. We have so many of these blocky mesas. Is it really a compelling sign of extraterrestrial intelligence that there’s one that looks a little like a human face? I think not. But I don’t blame people who are going into the NASA archives and trying to find things there; that is in the scientific spirit. I don’t blame people who are trying to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence—I think it’s a good idea, in fact. But I do object to people who consider shoddy and insufficient evidence as compelling.

QUESTION: May we hear your opinion on the canceling of the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas?

SAGAN: Yes. There are many physicists who think that that latter was a great tragedy. My own view is that it was not nearly explained well enough. We’re talking about eight, ten, twelve, fourteen billion dollars to do very arcane experiments — and I don’t think physicists did a good job at all in explaining to Congress why at a time of many pressures on the discretionary federal budget so much money should go to this. It doesn’t build weapons, it doesn’t cure diseases, it isn’t generally known or understood. What is it about and why should we spend money on it? I think the physicists have, not altogether but to a significant degree, themselves to blame.

QUESTION: A question concerning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It seems that we as skeptics, there’s an argument that seems very disappointing and maybe a bit persuasive in the Fermi paradox, the idea that if civilizations were to arise at any significant level, that even given a very extremely slow rate of expansion in the galaxy, that there’s been more than enough time for them to have populated the galaxy several times over. What’s your view on the Fermi paradox?

SAGAN: The Fermi paradox essentially says, as you said, that if there’s extraterrestrial high technology intelligence anywhere they should have been here because if they travel at the speed of light, the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. The galaxy is 10 billion years old, they should be here. And if you say you can’t travel at the speed of light, take a tenth of the speed of light, a hundredth of the speed of light, still much less than the age of the galaxy. William Newman and I published a paper on this very point, in which we point out: Imagine there is a civilization that has capable interstellar spacecraft and now they start exploring. What are we talking about? That they’re sending out 400 billion spacecraft, all at once, simultaneously, to every star in the galaxy? Not at all. Interstellar space flight is going to be hard, you’re going to go slow, you’re going to go to the nearest star systems first, you’re going to explore those stars. It is not a straight line but a diffusion question. And when you do the diffusion physics with the appropriate diffusivity, that is, the time to random walk, there are many cases in which the time for an advanced civilization to fully explore the galaxy in the sense of visiting every star system is considerably longer than the age of the galaxy. It’s just a bad model, we claim, the straight line, dedicated exploration of every star in the galaxy.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you’ve spoken about the need to, as you say, be defenders of science, or to spread the wonders of science and the value of science among those who are perhaps less well educated or have less of an appreciation of it. It seems to be quite a challenge, and I was wondering, in particular, there are many people, of course, plus the people in this room, perhaps a fairly large portion have some background in science. Amongst people who have what is called a liberal education, who may be in the arts or in the humanities, science has among many of them something of a bad name. I wonder if you have any thought on what path might be taken to remedy that situation.

SAGAN: I think one, perhaps, is to present science as it is, as something dazzling, as something tremendously exciting, as something eliciting feelings of reverence and awe, as something that our lives depend on. If it isn’t presented that way, if it’s presented in very dull textbook fashion, then of course people will be turned off. If the chemistry teacher is the basketball coach, if the school boards are unable to get support for the new school bond issue, if teachers’ salaries, especially in science, are very low, if very little is demanded of our students in terms of homework and original class time, if virtually every newspaper in the country has a daily astrology column and hardly any of them has a weekly science column, if the Sunday morning pundit shows never discuss science, if every one of the commercial television networks has somebody designated as a science reporter but he (it’s always he) never presents any science, it’s all technology and medicine, if an intelligent remark on science has never been uttered in living memory by a President of the United States, if in all of television there are no action-adventure series in which the hero or heroine is someone devoted to finding out how the universe works, if spiffy jackets attractive to the opposite sex are given to students who do well in football, basketball, and baseball but none in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, if we do all of that, then it is not surprising that a lot of people come out of the American educational system turned off, or having never experienced, science. That was a very long sentence.

QUESTION: Good evening, Dr. Sagan. Just one point first. Both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the CTV private network have female science reporters.

SAGAN: Excellent. I was only talking about the U.S. and I recognize that you are within range of Canadian broadcasting here in Seattle.

SAME QUESTIONER: I’m a Canadian myself.

SAGAN: I’m very glad to hear it. David Suzuki has done for many years an excellent job on Canadian television.

SAME QUESTIONER: Absolutely. With the debacle of cold fusion, which may be said to be the ultimate proof of the scientific method with its peer review and its replicability or lack of same, if you were a person who is interested in the question of developing energy sources that would be both safer than the ones we use now and less expensive, would you continue to work in the area of fusion, and if not where would you work?

SAGAN: Cold fusion or hot fusion?

SAME QUESTIONER: I understand that hot fusion takes up a lot more energy than it ultimately produces.

SAGAN: But the margin is shrinking. If it were up to me, there’s nothing in the way of compelling evidence for cold fusion, but if there were such a thing as cold fusion—you know, desktop conversion into enormous energy—we need that. So I can understand why there are companies, especially abroad, that are devoting small resources to it. I don’t think that’s cause for apoplexy. It’ll probably come to nothing, but if there are scientists who want to spend their time on that, let them do it. Maybe they’ll find something else that’s interesting. On hot fusion, the margin, as I said, is shrinking, but the predicted, even optimistic estimates when commercial, large-scale, worldwide hot fusion would be available is too far into the twenty-first century to solve the energy problems we have today.

The energy problems I’m talking about are in particular global warming, the burning of fossil fuels. So what I would encourage is first of all, much greater emphasis on efficient use of fossil fuels—fluorescent rather than incandescent bulbs, you save a factor of several, or to put it another way, with the same amount of photons you put three or four or five times fewer carbon dioxide molecules into the atmosphere from the coal- burning power plant that provides the electricity. And I would put the money into forcing the automobile companies to produce cars that get 75, 85, 95 miles a gallon. Why are we satisfied with 25 miles a gallon when it is commercially perfectly possible to have safe, quick acceleration, spunky-looking cars that are efficient in their burning of petroleum? And then the other area where I would put emphasis is in non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel, of which I would stress biomass conversion, solar-electric power, and wind turbines, all of which are technologies that are coming along very swiftly despite, until recently, real hostility in the U.S. government. Let me give you just one political story. There was once a president of the United States recently in the news named Jimmy Carter. He thought that there was an energy problem and he gave, in effect, talks to the nation in his cardigan sweater saying about how you should save electricity. He put into the roof of the White House a solar thermal converter which circulated cold water to the roof, and on sunny days in Washington sunlight heated this water and in repeated passes it made it very hot, and when it was time for a Presidential shower, here was hot water that did not rely on a power plant. He was succeeded by a President named Ronald Reagan. One of the first acts in office of President Reagan was to rip out the solar thermal converter from the roof of the White House at considerable cost—after all, it was in there and working—because he was ideologically opposed to alternatives to fossil fuels. We lost twelve years in research into these alternatives during the Reagan-Bush administration.

QUESTION: The dapper gentleman there, Bill Nye, his work on television bodes well for science education; he’s to be applauded. I also want to thank you for answering all my questions about Richard Nixon; it explains a lot. You expressed some encouragement about the age mixture represented here in this audience. I wonder if you would comment on the conspicuous lack of racial diversity and the implications for science education in general.

SAGAN: Thank you. We also might ask how it is that of the first ten or twelve questioners only one was a woman in an audience in which women are much more strongly represented. These are wide-ranging, difficult questions. I don’t claim to have the answers except to say that I know of no evidence that women and what in the United States are called racial minorities are not as competent as anybody else in doing science. It has to do, I think, entirely, or almost entirely, with the built-in biases and prejudices of the educational system and the way the society trains people. Nothing more than that. Women, for example, who are told that they’re too stupid for science, that science isn’t for them, that science is a male thing, are turned off. And women who despite that try to go into science and then find hostility from the high school math teacher—“What are you doing in my class?”—find hostility from the 95 percent male science classes, with the kind of raucous male culture in which they find themselves excluded, those are powerful social pressures to leave science. I wrote a novel once, Contact, in which I tried to describe what women dedicated to science have to face, that men don’t, in order to make a career in science.

QUESTION: I would like to challenge you to answer the questions without ridicule....

SAGAN: Fire away.

SAME QUESTIONER: ...whether they be about crop circles, Richard Hoagland, or the abductees.

SAGAN: I didn’t think I had any ridicule there.

SAME QUESTIONER: I think you had quite a lot. I was quite offended.

SAGAN: Which one particularly?

SAME QUESTIONER: The crop circles, the jokes you started with, the answer about Richard Hoagland offended me.

SAGAN: Okay, let’s take one. Let’s take Richard Hoagland —

SAME QUESTIONER: I would like to ask you in general to watch the ridicule. There are so many people here that think such ideas are worthy of ridicule. You have spoken about the need for compassion. I would like to see you model that here.

SAGAN: I appreciate that remark, and if I had not done what I preached I apologize. However, you must recognize —

SAME QUESTIONER: I accept your apology.

SAGAN: There was an “if” in front of the apology: However, you must recognize that vigorous debate is an essential aspect of getting to the truth, and the fact that Mr. Hoagland, for example, is not here—unless he is somewhere— I had nothing to do with it. Someone asked me a question about Richard Hoagland; I said what I thought. I happen to know that when Mr. Hoagland is asked questions and I’m not present, he says things about me, that I sometimes wish I had a chance to —

SAME QUESTIONER (interrupting): Are you capable of modeling him?

SAGAN: I don’t understand the question. What do you mean “modeling?”

SAME QUESTIONER: Modeling. Modeling compassion.

SAGAN: I’ve known Richard Hoagland for many, many years. I think I have just the right measure of compassion. (Laughter)

QUESTION: After the lady’s question I don’t know if mine is appropriate. I was going to ask you: We have Scott Peck, psychiatrist, Dr. [Brian] Weiss, he wrote Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr. [John] Mack [the Harvard psychiatrist who contended patients who say they were abducted by aliens are describing real events, and who spoke at the conference], we saw him yesterday, Dr. [Raymond] Moody—they’re all mighty good thinkers. How do you think they went wrong?

SAGAN: I’m being asked to speculate offering psychiatric matters—hard to do. Some of those people I know very well, some I have never met. I don’t think it would be right for me to guess why it is that they don’t agree with me. I think that’s all I want to say about it. I tried to stress before that it doesn’t matter what the character of the debater is, it doesn’t matter what reservations we have about him or her, what matters is the quality of the argument presented. For each of these people, I think the issue is: is there evidence? Yes, Dr. Moody has an M.D. but he uses, as I said, my own memories of my parents speaking to me as evidence of life after death. I know that’s not a good argument. I know better than he what those voices are about, and so, by extrapolation, I think maybe the rest of his argument isn’t so good. To the extent that I have some way of hooking onto the arguments I try to use what I know and see if there’s a good case or not. I want to stress that there are some claims in the areas of parascience or pseudoscience that may well turn out to be right. And I don’t think that is a reason for us not to demand the highest standards of argument about it.

For example, one thing I didn’t mention to the last questioner: when Mars Observer was on its way to Mars with the high-resolution camera that might photograph things about the size of this, I thought that among the many other targets, it ought to take a look at the so-called face and settle the issue. If it’s just some odd aspect of eolian abrasion on Mars, let’s find that out. If it’s something else, let’s find that out. The fact that I think I understand, via the Richard Nixon eggplant, what the face on Mars is, doesn’t mean that I don’t want anyone to check it out. I could be wrong. If we have the tool to, with a few pictures, find out what the answer is, for heaven’s sake let’s do it. So each of these cases. In Johnny Mack’s case I would say: “Never mind anecdotes, let’s ask about physical evidence.”

The claim is that many abductees have probes inserted up their nostrils, into their sinuses, which are, who knows, monitoring devices telling about where they’ve been and what’s happening to their bodies. I say—and I’ve said to Mack a number of times—you give me one of those and we’ll give it a really close scrutiny, and let’s see if can we find evidence of alien manufacture. Are there principles of physical laws we don’t understand? Are there isotopic ratios or the immiscibility of metals that we don’t know about on Earth? Are there elements from the so-called island of stability, heavy elements, transuranic elements that are thought to be stable but we don’t have any of them on Earth? There are many possibilities and you’ve certainly guessed that in some way an object of manufacture by aliens of extremely advanced capability—they travel from interstellar space, they effortlessly slither through walls, those guys really have powerful technology. Let’s look at this. Never has there been one made available. There’s always one about to be made available, there’s always one that is going to be given to a laboratory, but it never happens.

What is that standard story that I get from Mack and others about the implants? It’s that the abductees, going about his or her everyday life, and in many cases like this it is alleged the implant dropped out, clunk. The abductee picks it up, looks at it incuriously, and throws it in the garbage. Never once— and as a rule, this may prove my case—does he give it to some chemist or physicist, a chemist or physicist who could demonstrate the existence of alien technology. They’d give their eye teeth for that. They would be crawling all over each other to be able to examine the artifact. How come we’ve never had one case like that which really works out? I think that is a telling counterargument to all the anecdotal claims.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, we are fourteen years into the AIDS epidemic, HIV epidemic right now in this country, and apparently scientifically we are not coming any closer to finding a cure, creating a vaccine, even though there’s lots of money being expended. And apparently also now there are new superbugs or new strains of bacteria that are becoming resistant to many of the antibiotics. You spoke about a concern for your children and your grandchildren in terms of what’s happening. I’m just curious; what implications you see with these newfound illnesses, viruses, that are all of a sudden coming to us who believe that we were conquering everything in this day and age.

SAGAN: This is natural selection in action. If we overdose ourselves with antibiotics, we wipe out all the microorganisms not resistant to antibiotics and preferentially amplify the ones that are resistant. Eventually we arrange things, very cleverly, so that the entire population of microorganisms inside our bodies—including the disease-causing ones—are resistant to antibiotics. So overdosing antibiotics, which physicians have done routinely for reasons that are not hard to understand, is a mistake. Part of the answer is of course not to overdose anymore, and also to develop new strains of antibiotics. There ought to be major efforts to do that. On AIDS, my impression is that while there is nothing like a vaccine or a cure, there are substantial advances in the molecular biology of the HIV virus, and I take that to be a sign of significant hope, but of course  not on the time scale of someone who is dying of AIDS. It’s very slow in that respect. I don’t think this is a money-driven situation. I don’t think there just isn’t enough money. I think there is enough money and some things maybe are not supported well enough, but in general there is, and it’s a matter of not enough wisdom, not the right experiments, not having progressed far enough, not having done it swiftly enough. There’s nothing magical about the HIV virus. It will succumb eventually to the ministrations of molecular biology. And I hope, for the reasons you mentioned, that that time will come soon.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, my question is in regard to the future of the skeptical movement.

SAGAN: Thank you. That’s a good thing to end on.

SAME QUESTIONER: The responsibility that we have now, I feel, is as great as ever. The skeptical movement has been around for a number of years, perhaps thousands. First of all, I’d like to applaud the leadership of the skeptical movement we have here with you and the panel of speakers we have this weekend. But also important is the grassroots movements, the consensus of opinion of those that do adhere to the tenet, logic, reason, skeptical inquiry. We’re at a point in time now that it’s very important, and after having read the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER over a number of years and other articles and books and so forth, I find it somewhat amusing to see some of the investigations on a number of subjects like Paul Kurtz mentioned, we have hundreds of them—crystal power, pyramid power, a Loch Ness monster, whatever, I could go on and on. To be most effective in the long run I would think that would be something we would need to look at.

SAGAN: What would be?

SAME QUESTIONER: To be effective in fostering the logic and reason in skeptical thinking. I have found these various subject matters to be interesting and yet probably a greater area we could look at is the investigation into the major religions of the world.

SAGAN: Now we’re to it. Okay.

SAME QUESTIONER: There are billions and billions of people that adhere to the tenets of these religions and I would imagine that we could spend more time in the skeptical movement—

SAGAN: In essence your question is: Should the skeptical movement devote some of its attention to religion?

SAME QUESTIONER: Well said.

SAGAN: This is a really good question, and I know that Richard Dawkins talked about this a year or so ago, and drew the conclusion that many religious beliefs were not noticeably different from any of the parasciences or pseudosciences beliefs, and why one of them is the object of our attention and the other is off-limits, and he urged that we be, if I may use the expression, more ecumenical in our hostility. I will answer in the following way: first, that there is no human culture without religion. That being the case, that immediately says that religion provides some essential meat, and if that’s the case shouldn’t we be a little careful about condemning something that it desperately needed? For example, if I am with someone who has just lost a loved one, I do not think it is appropriate for me to say, “You know, there’s no scientific evidence for life after death.” If that person is gaining some degree of support, stability, from the thought that the loved one has gone to heaven and that they will be joined after the person I’m talking to, himself or herself, dies. That would be uncompassionate and foolish. Science provides a great deal, but there are some things that it doesn’t provide. Religion is an attempt to provide, whether truly or falsely, some solutions to those problems. Human mortality is one of those where there isn’t a smidgeon of help from science. Yes, it’s a grand and glorious universe, yes it’s amazing to be part of it, yes we weren’t alive before we were born (not much before we were born) so we hope we’re alive after we’re dead. We won’t know about it. It’s a big deal. But that’s not too reassuring, at least to many people.

Take the issue of the Bible. The Bible is in my view a magnificent work of poetry, has some good history in it, has some good ethical and moral scriptures—but by no means everywhere, the book of Joshua is a horror, for example— and on those grounds is well worth our respect. But on the other hand, the Book of Genesis was written in the sixth century B.C. during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The Babylonians were the chief scientists of the time. The Jews picked up the best science available and put it in the book of Genesis, but we have learned something in the intervening two and a half millennia, and to believe in the literal truth of the attempted science in the Bible, is to believe too much. I know there are Biblical literalists who believe that every jot and tittle in the Bible is the direct word of God, given to a scrupulous and flawless stenographer, and with no attempt to use the understanding of the time, or metaphor or allegory, but just straight-out truth. I know there are people who think that. That seems to me highly unlikely. I think the way to approach the Bible is with some critical wits about us, but not dismissing it out of hand. There’s a lot of good stuff in the Bible. Case-by-case basis is what I’m saying. Where religion does not pretend to do science, I think we should be open within the boundaries of good sense. I think that you cannot extract an “ought” from an “is,”and therefore science per se does not tell us how we should behave, although it can certainly shed considerable light on the consequences of alternative kinds of behavior. From that we can decide how to arrange our legal codes and what to do. So the idea of an all-out attack on religion I think on many grounds would be foolish, but the idea of treating Biblical literalism, for example, with some skeptical scrutiny is an excellent idea. But it is being done, has been done for the last century by Biblical scholars themselves. I don’t think there’s any particular expertise in this movement for a critical examination of the Bible. There are other people who are doing it just fine.

I hope that sort of middle ground is not too different from what you were asking about, but I certainly don’t think that religion should be off-limits. I don’t think anything should be off limits. We should feel free to discuss and debate everything. That’s what the Bill of Rights is about. And in that sense, and many other senses, the constitution of the United States, particularly the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment, and the scientific method are very mutually supportive approaches to knowledge. Both of them recognize the extreme dangers of having to pay attention to and do whatever the authority says.

Do we care what's true? Does it matter?

… where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise

wrote the poet Thomas Gray. But is it? Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better:

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

It's disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but is it better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

In The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, as so many before and after, decries the “unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man” brought about by the scientific revolution. Nietzsche mourns the loss of “man's belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplaceability in the scheme of existence.” For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Which attitude is better geared for our long-term survival? Which gives us more leverage on our future? And if our naive self-confidence is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss? Is there not cause to welcome it as a maturing and character-building experience?

To discover that the universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to 12 thousand years old¹ improves our appreciation of its sweep and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity, at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover, as now seems probable, that our planet is one of billions of other worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and that our galaxy is one of billions more, majestically expands the arena of what is possible; to find that our ancestors were also the ancestors of apes ties us to the rest of life and makes possible important—if occasionally rueful—reflections on human nature.

Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor. But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, distracting us, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future.

These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature—often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with gullibility. With the uninformed cooperation (and often the cynical connivance) of newspapers, magazines, book publishers, radio, television, movie producers, and the like, such ideas are easily and widely available. Far more difficult to come upon are the alternative, more challenging, and even more dazzling findings of science.

Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science because distracting confrontations with reality—where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided. The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed. In part for these same reasons, it is much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science. But this isn't enough to explain its popularity.

Naturally people try various belief systems on for size, to see if they help. And if we're desperate enough, we become all too willing to abandon what may be perceived as the heavy burden of skepticism. Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for (like those attributed to comic book superheroes today, and earlier, to the gods). In some of its manifestations, it offers satisfaction of spiritual hungers, cures for disease, promises that death is not the end. It reassures us of our cosmic centrality and importance. It vouchsafes that we are hooked up with, tied to, the universe.² Sometimes it's a kind of halfway house between old religion and new science, mistrusted by both.

At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also, New Age and Old) is the idea that wishing makes it so. How satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children's stories, to fulfill our heart's desire just by wishing. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with the hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes. The enchanted fish or the genie from the lamp will grant us three wishes—anything we want except more wishes. Who has not pondered—just to be on the safe side, just in case we ever come upon and accidentally rub an old, squat brass oil lamp—what to ask for?

I remember, from childhood comic strips and books, a top-hatted, mustachioed magician who brandished an ebony walking stick. His name was Zatara. He could make anything happen, anything at all. How did he do it? Easy. He uttered his commands backwards. So if he wanted a million dollars, he would say “srallod noillim a em evig.” That's all there was to it. It was something like prayer, but much surer of results.

I spent a lot of time at age eight experimenting in this vein, commanding stones to levitate: “esir, enots.” It never worked. I blamed my pronunciation.

Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood—except that the language breaks down here. If you've never heard of science (to say nothing of how it works), you can hardly be aware you're embracing pseudoscience. You're simply thinking in one of the ways that humans always have. Religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artifact from times long gone. In some countries nearly everyone believes in astrology and precognition, including government leaders. But this is not simply drummed into them by religion; it is drawn out of the enveloping culture in which everyone is comfortable with these practices, and affirming testimonials are everywhere.

Most of the case histories I will relate are American—because these are the cases I know best, not because pseudoscience and mysticism are more prominent in the United States than elsewhere. But the psychic spoonbender and extraterrestrial channeler Uri Geller hails from Israel. As tensions rise between Algerian secularists and Moslem fundamentalists, more and more people are discreetly consulting the country's 10,000 soothsayers and clairvoyants (about half of whom operate with a license from the government). High French officials, including a former president of France, arranged for millions of dollars to be invested in a scam (the Elf-Aquitaine scandal) to find new petroleum reserves from the air. In Germany, there is concern about carcinogenic “Earth rays” undetectable by science; they can be sensed only by experienced dowsers brandishing forked sticks. “Psychic surgery” flourishes in the Philippines. Ghosts are something of a national obsession in Britain. Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural. An estimated 100,000 fortunetellers flourish in Japan; the clientele are mainly young women. Aum Shinrikyo, a sect thought to be involved in the release of the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway system in March 1995, features levitation, faith healing, and ESP among its main tenets. Followers, at a high price, drank the “miracle pond” water—from the bath of Asaraha, their leader. In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. “Witches” are today being burned in South Africa. Australian peace-keeping forces in Haiti rescue a woman tied to a tree; she is accused of flying from rooftop to rooftop, and sucking the blood of children. Astrology is rife in India, geomancy widespread in China.

Perhaps the most successful recent global pseudoscience—by many criteria, already a religion—is the Hindu doctrine of transcendental meditation (TM). The soporific homilies of its founder and spiritual leader, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, can be seen on television. Seated in the yogi position, his white hair here and there flecked with black, surrounded by garlands and floral offerings, he has a look. One day while channel surfing we came upon this visage. “You know who that is?” asked our four-year-old son. “God.” The worldwide TM organization has an estimated valuation of 3 billion. For a fee they promise through meditation to be able to walk you through walls, to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. By thinking in unison they have, they say, diminished the crime rate in Washington, D.C., and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, among other secular miracles. Not one smattering of real evidence has been offered for any such claims. TM sells folk medicine, runs trading companies, medical clinics and “research” universities, and has unsuccessfully entered politics. In its oddly charismatic leader, its promise of community, and the offer of magical powers in exchange for money and fervent belief, it is typical of many pseudosciences marketed for sacerdotal export.

At each relinquishing of civil controls and scientific education another little spun in pseudoscience occurs. Leon Trotsky described it for Germany on the eve of the Hider takeover (but in a description that might equally have applied to the Soviet Union of 1933):

Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms. . . . Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!

Russia is an instructive case. Under the tsars, religious superstition was encouraged, but scientific and skeptical thinking—except by a few tame scientists—was ruthlessly expunged. Under Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically suppressed—except for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far short of this ideal as the most unself-critical mystery cult. Critical thinking—except by scientists in hermetically sealed compartments of knowledge—was recognized as dangerous, was not taught in the schools, and was punished where expressed. As a result, post-Communism, many Russians view science with suspicion. When the lid was lifted, as was also true of virulent ethnic hatreds, what had all along been bubbling subsurface was exposed to view. The region is now awash in UFOs, poltergeists, faith healers, quack medicines, magic waters, and old-rime superstition. A stunning decline in life expectancy, increasing infant mortality, rampant epidemic disease, subminimal medical standards, and ignorance of preventative medicine all work to raise the threshold at which skepticism is triggered in an increasingly desperate population. As I write, the electorally most popular member of the Duma, a leading supporter of the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is one Anatoly Kashpirovsky—a faith healer who remotely cures diseases ranging from hernias to AIDS by glaring at you out of your television set. His face starts stopped clocks.

A somewhat analogous situation exists in China. After the death of Mao Zedong and the gradual emergence of a market economy, UFOs, channeling, and other examples of Western pseudoscience emerged, along with such ancient Chinese practices as ancestor worship, astrology, and fortune telling—especially that version that involves throwing yarrow sticks and working through the hoary tetragrams of the I Ching. The government newspaper lamented that “the superstition of feudal ideology is reviving in our countryside.” It was (and remains) a rural, not primarily an urban, affliction.

Individuals with “special powers” gained enormous followings. They could, they said, project Qi, the “energy field of the universe,” out of their bodies to change the molecular structure of a chemical 2000 kilometers away, to communicate with aliens, to cure diseases. Some patients died under the ministrations of one of these “masters of Qi Gong” who was arrested and convicted in 1993. Wang Hongcheng, an amateur chemist, claimed to have synthesized a liquid, small amounts of which, when added to water, would convert it to gasoline or the equivalent. For a time he was funded by the army and the secret police, but when his invention was found to be a scam he was arrested and imprisoned. Naturally the story spread that his misfortune resulted not from fraud, but from his unwillingness to reveal his “secret formula” to the government. (Similar stories have circulated in America for decades, usually with the government role replaced by a major oil or auto company.) Asian rhinos are being driven to extinction because their horns, when pulverized, are said to prevent impotence; the market encompasses all of East Asia.

The government of China and the Chinese Communist Party were alarmed by certain of these developments. On December 5, 1994, they issued a joint proclamation that read in part:

[P]ublic education in science has been withering in recent years. At the same time, activities of superstition and ignorance have been growing, and anti-science and pseudoscience cases have become frequent. Therefore, effective measures must be applied as soon as possible to strengthen public education in science. The level of public education in science and technology is an important sign of the national scientific accomplishment. It is a matter of overall importance in economic development, scientific advance, and the progress of society. We must be attentive and implement such public education as part of the strategy to modernize our socialist country and to make our nation powerful and prosperous. Ignorance is never socialist, nor is poverty.

So pseudoscience in America is part of a global trend. Its causes, dangers, diagnosis, and treatment are likely to be similar everywhere. Here, psychics ply their wares on extended television commercials, personally endorsed by entertainers. They have their own channel, the “Psychic Friends Network”; a million people a year sign on and use such guidance in their everyday lives. For the CEOs of major corporations, for financial analysts, for lawyers and bankers there is a species of astrologer/soothsayer/ psychic ready to advise on any matter. “If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor,” says a psychic from Cleveland, Ohio. Royalty has traditionally been vulnerable to psychic frauds. In ancient China and Rome astrology was the exclusive property of the emperor; any private use of this potent art was considered a capital offense. Emerging from a particularly credulous Southern California culture, Nancy and Ronald Reagan relied on an astrologer in private and public matters—unknown to the voting public. Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of charlatans. If anything, the practice is comparatively muted in America; its venue is worldwide.

As amusing as some of pseudoscience may seem, as confident as we may be that we would never be so gullible as to be swept up by such a doctrine, we know it's happening all around us. Transcendental Meditation and Aum Shinrikyo seem to have attracted a large number of accomplished people, some with advanced degrees in physics or engineering. These are not doctrines for nitwits. Something else is going on.

What's more, no one interested in what religions are and how they begin can ignore them. While vast barriers may seem to stretch between a local, single-focus contention of pseudoscience and something like a world religion, the partitions are very thin. The world presents us with nearly insurmountable problems. A wide variety of solutions are offered, some of very limited worldview, some of portentous sweep. In the usual Darwinian natural selection of doctrines, some thrive for a time, while most quickly vanish. But a few—sometimes, as history has shown, the most scruffy and least prepossessing among them—may have the power to profoundly change the history of the world.

The continuum stretching from ill-practiced science, pseudoscience, and superstition (New Age or Old), all the way to respectable mystery religion, based on revelation, is indistinct. I try not to use the word “cult” in its usual meaning of a religion the speaker dislikes, but try to reach for the headstone of knowledge—do they really know what they claim to know? Everyone, it turns out, has relevant expertise.

I am critical of the excesses of theology, because at the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge at the outset the prodigious diversity and complexity of religious thought and practice over the millennia; the growth of liberal religion and ecumenical fellowship during the last century, and the fact that—as in the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Reform Judaism, Vatican II, and the so-called higher criticism of the Bible—religion has fought (with varying degrees of success) its own excesses. But in parallel to the many scientists who seem reluctant to debate or even publicly discuss pseudoscience, many proponents of mainstream religions are reluctant to take on extreme conservatives and fundamentalists. If the trend continues, eventually the field is theirs; they can win the debate by default.

One religious leader writes to me of his longing for “disciplined integrity” in religion:

We have grown far too sentimental. . . . Devotionalism and cheap psychology on one side, and arrogance and dogmatic intolerance on the other distort authentic religious life almost beyond recognition. Sometimes I come close to despair, but then I live tenaciously and always with hope. . . . Honest religion, more familiar than its critics with the distortions and absurdities perpetrated in its name, has an active interest in encouraging a healthy skepticism for its own purposes. . . . There is the possibility for religion and science to forge a potent partnership against pseudo-science. Strangely, I think it would soon be engaged also in opposing pseudo-religion.

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.

Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.

Motor ability in healthy people is almost perfect. We rarely stumble and fall, except in young and old age. We can learn tasks such as riding a bicycle or skating or skipping, jumping rope or driving a car, and retain that mastery for the rest of our lives. Even if we've gone a decade without doing it, it comes back to us effortlessly. The precision and retention of our motor skills may, however, give us a false sense of confidence in our other talents. Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. A most illuminating book called How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, shows how people systematically err in understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being influenced by the opinions of others. We're good in some things, but not in everything. Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. “For Man is a giddy thing,” teaches William Shakespeare. That's where the stuffy skeptical rigor of science comes in.

Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudoscience is that science has a far keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or “inerrant” revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error—even serious error, profound mistakes—will be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our chances improve enormously.

If we teach only the findings and products of science—no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be—without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? Both then are presented as unsupported assertion. In Russia and China, it used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities taught. The distinction between science and pseudoscience was made for you. No perplexities needed to be muddled through. But when profound political changes occurred and strictures on free thought were loosened, a host of confident or charismatic claims—especially those that told us what we wanted to hear—gained a vast following. Every notion, however improbable, became authoritative.

It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of Nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, we've been assured by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical evidence—not star maps remembered from years ago, not scars, not disturbed soil, but real alien technology—was in hand. The analysis would be released momentarily. These claims go back to the earliest crashed saucer scam of Newton and GeBauer. Now it's decades later and we're still waiting. Where are the articles published in the refereed scientific literature, in the metallurgical and ceramics journals, in publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in Science or Nature?

Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real artifacts, physicists and chemists would be fighting for the privilege of discovering that there are aliens among us—who use, say, unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile strength or ductility or conductivity. The practical implications of such a finding—never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion—would be immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for. Their absence must tell us something.

Notes

1. "No thinking religious person believes this. Old hat," writes one of the referees of this book. But many "scientific creationists" not only believe it, but are making increasingly aggressive and successful efforts to have it taught in the schools, museums, zoos, and textbooks. Why? Because adding up die "begars." the ages of patriarchs and others in the Bible, gives such a figure, and the Bible is "inerrant."
2. Although it's hard for me to see a more profound cosmic connection than die astonishing findings of modem nuclear astrophysics: Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starsruff.
3. As the pioneering physicist Benjamin Franklin put it, "In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy?" At the very least, he thought, the experience sufficed to "help to make a vain Man humble."

Even with an early bedtime in winter you could see the stars. What were they? They weren’t like hedges or even streetlights; they were different. So I asked my friends what they were. They said, “They’re lights in the sky, kid.” I could tell they were lights in the sky, but that wasn’t an explanation. I mean, what were they? Little electric bulbs on long black wires, so you couldn’t see what they were held up by? What were they?

Not only could nobody tell me, but nobody even had the sense that it was an interesting question. They looked at me funny. I asked my parents; I asked my parents’ friends; I asked other adults. None of them knew. My mother said to me, “Look, we’ve just got you a library card. Take it, get on the streetcar, go to the New Utrecht branch of the New York Public Library, get out a book and find the answer.”

That seemed to me a fantastically clever idea. I made the journey. I asked the librarian for a book on stars. (I was very small; I can still remember looking up at her, and she was sitting down.) She was gone a few minutes, brought one back, and gave it to me. Eagerly I sat down and opened the pages. But it was about Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, I think, a terrible disappointment. And so I went back to her, explained (it wasn’t easy for me to do) that that wasn’t what I had in mind at all, that what I wanted was a book about real stars. She thought this was funny, which embarrassed me further. But anyway, she went and got another book, the right kind of book. I took it and opened it and slowly turned the pages, until I came to the answer.

It was in there. It was stunning. The answer was that the Sun was a star, except very far away. The stars were suns; if you were close to them, they would look just like our sun. I tried to imagine how far away from the Sun you’d have to be for it to be as dim as a star. Of course I didn’t know the inverse-square law of light propagation; I hadn’t a ghost of a chance of figuring it out. But it was clear to me that you’d have to be very far away. Farther away, probably, than New Jersey. The dazzling idea of a universe vast beyond imagining swept over me. It has stayed with me ever since.

I sensed awe. And later on (it took me several years to find this), I realized that we were on a planet—a little, nonself-luminous world going around our star. And so all those other stars might have planets going around them. If planets, then life, intelligence, other Brooklyns—who knew? The diversity of those possible worlds struck me. They didn’t have to be exactly like ours, I was sure of it.

It seemed the most exciting thing to study. I didn’t realize that you could be a professional scientist; I had the idea that I’d have to be, I don’t know, a salesman (my father said that was better than the manufacturing end of things), and do science on weekends and evenings. It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school that my biology teacher revealed to me that there was such a thing as a professional scientist, who got paid to do it; so you could spend all your time learning about the universe. It was a glorious day.

It’s been my enormous good luck—I was born at just the right time—to have had, to some extent, those childhood ambitions satisfied. I’ve been involved in the exploration of the solar system, in the most amazing parallel to the science fiction of my childhood. We actually send spacecraft to other worlds. We fly by them; we orbit them; we land on them. We design and control the robots: Tell it to dig, and it digs. Tell it to determine the chemistry of a soil sample, and it determines the chemistry. For me the continuum from childhood wonder and early science fiction to professional reality has been almost seamless. It’s never been, “Oh, gee, this is nothing like what I had imagined.” Just the opposite: It’s exactly like what I imagined. And so I feel enormously fortunate.

Science is still one of my chief joys. The popularization of science that Isaac Asimov did so well—the communication not just of the findings but of the methods of science—seems to me as natural as breathing. After all, when you’re in love, you want to tell the world. The idea that scientists shouldn’t talk about their science to the public seems to me bizarre.

There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It’s a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children’s generation, or my grandchildren’s generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we’re a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness. CSICOP plays a sometimes lonely but still—and in this case the word may be right—heroic role in trying to counter some of those trends.

We have a civilization based on science and technology, and we’ve cleverly arranged things so that almost nobody understands science and technology. That is as clear a prescription for disaster as you can imagine. While we might get away with this combustible mixture of ignorance and power for a while, sooner or later it’s going to blow up in our faces. The powers of modern technology are so formidable that it’s insufficient just to say, “Well, those in charge, I’m sure, are doing a good job.” This is a democracy, and for us to make sure that the powers of science and technology are used properly and prudently, we ourselves must understand science and technology. We must be involved in the decision-making process.

The predictive powers of some areas, at least, of science are phenomenal. They are the clearest counterargument I can imagine to those who say, “Oh, science is situational; science is just the current fashion; science is the promotion of the self-interests of those in power.” Surely there is some of that. Surely if there’s any powerful tool, those in power will try to use it, or even monopolize it. Surely scientists, being people, grow up in a society and reflect the prejudices of that society. How could it be otherwise? Some scientists have been nationalists; some have been racists; some have been sexists. But that doesn’t undermine the validity of science. It’s just a consequence of being human.

So, imagine—there are so many areas we could think of—imagine you want to know the sex of your unborn child. There are several approaches. You could, for example, do what the late film star who Annie and I admire greatly—Cary Grant—did before he was an actor. In a carnival or fair or consulting room, you suspend a watch or a plumb bob above the abdomen of the expectant mother; if it swings left-right it’s a boy, and if it swings forward-back it’s a girl. The method works one time in two. Of course he was out of there before the baby was born, so he never heard from customers who complained he got it wrong. Being right one chance in two—that’s not so bad. It’s better than, say, Kremlinologists used to do. But if you really want to know, then you go to amniocentesis, or to sonograms; and there your chance of being right is 99 out of 100. It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than one out of two. If you really want to know, you go to science.

Or suppose you wanted to know when the next eclipse of the Sun is. Science does something really astonishing: It can tell you a century in advance where the eclipse is going to be on Earth and when, say, totality will be, to the second. Think of the predictive power this implies. Think of how much you must understand to be able to say when and where there’s going to be an eclipse so far in the future.

Or (the same physics exactly) imagine launching a spacecraft from Earth, like the Voyager spacecraft in 1977; 12 years later Voyager 1 arrives at Neptune within 100 kilometers or something of where it was supposed to be—not having to use some of the mid-course corrections that were available; 12 yean, 5 billion kilometers, on target!

So if you want to really be able to predict the future—not in everything, but in some areas—there’s only one regime of human scholarship, of human claims to knowledge, that really delivers the goods, and that’s science. Religions would give their eyeteeth to be able to predict anything like that well. Think of how much mileage they would make if they ever could do predictions comparably unambiguous and precise.

Now how does it work? Why is it so successful?

Science has built-in error-correcting mechanisms—because science recognizes that scientists, like everybody else, are fallible, that we make mistakes, that we’re driven by the same prejudices as everybody else. There are no forbidden questions. Arguments from authority are worthless. Claims must be demonstrated. Ad hominem arguments—arguments about the personality of somebody who disagrees with you—are irrelevant; they can be sleazeballs and be right, and you can be a pillar of the community and be wrong.

If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But there’s one thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism that is considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her Ph.D. oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem hostile or contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. The students naturally are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to answer questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate questions; they have to think, “Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find—because I sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I’m not prepared, I’m in deep trouble.”

You take a look at contentious scientific meetings. You find university colloquia in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into presenting what she or he is saying, and suddenly there are interruptions, maybe withering questions, from the audience. You take a look at the publication conventions in which you submit a scientific paper to a journal, and it goes out to anonymous referees whose job it is to think, Did you do anything stupid? If you didn’t do anything stupid, is there anything in here that is sufficiently interesting to be published? What are the deficiencies of this paper? Has it been done by anybody else? Is the argument adequate, or should you resubmit the paper after you’ve actually demonstrated what you’re speculating on? And so on. And it’s anonymous: You don’t know who your critics are. You have to rely on the editor to send it out to real experts who are not overtly malicious. This is the everyday expectation in the scientific community. And those who don’t expect it—even good scientists who just can’t hold up under criticism—have difficult careers.

Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist likes to be criticized. Every scientist feels an affection for his or her ideas and scientific results. You feel protective of them. But you don’t reply to critics: “Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I’m very fond of it. It’s done you no harm. Please don’t attack it.” That’s not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away. Don’t waste any neurons on what doesn’t work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton. (Isaac Newton was surely the greatest physicist before Albert Einstein.)

Now think of what other areas of human society have such a reward structure, in which we revere those who prove that the fundamental doctrines that we have adopted are wrong. Think of it in politics, or in economics, or in religion; think of it in how we organize our society. Often, it’s exactly the opposite: There we reward those who reassure us that what we’ve been told is right, that we need not concern ourselves about it. This difference, I believe, is at least a basic reason why we’ve made so much progress in science, and so little in some other areas.

We are fallible. We cannot expect to foist our wishes on the universe. So another key aspect of science is experiment. Scientists do not trust what is intuitively obvious, because intuitively obvious gets you nowhere. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. I mean, really obvious; obvious! Go out in a flat field and take a look: Is it round or flat? Don’t listen to me; go prove it to yourself. That heavier bodies fall faster than light ones was once obvious. That blood-sucking leeches cure disease was once obvious. That some people are naturally and by divine right slaves was once obvious. That the Earth is at the center of the universe was once obvious. You’re skeptical? Go out, take a look: stars rise in the East, set in the West; here we are, stationary (do you feel the Earth whirling?); we see them going around us. We are at the center; they go around us.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth—never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they’d be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: “To physics and metaphysics.” Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy—truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and . . . the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

Why is it so important to have widely distributed understanding of science and technology? For one thing, it’s the golden road out of poverty for developing nations. And developing nations understand that, because you have only to look at modern American graduate schools—in mathematics, in engineering, in physics—to find, in case after case, that more than half the students are from other countries. This is something America is doing for the world. But it conveys a clear sense that the developing nations understand what is essential for their future. What worries me is that Americans may not be equally dear on the subject.

Let me touch on the dangers of technology. Almost every astronaut who has visited Earth orbit has made this point: I was up there, they say, and I looked toward the horizon, and there was this thin, blue band that’s the Earth’s atmosphere. I had been told we live in an ocean of air. But there it was, so fragile, such a delicate blue: I was worried for it.

In fact, the thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere, compared with the size of the Earth, is in about the same ratio as the thickness of a coat of shellac on a schoolroom globe is to the diameter of the globe. That’s the air that nurtures us and almost all other life on Earth, that protects us from deadly ultraviolet light from the Sun, that through the greenhouse effect brings the surface temperature above the freezing point. (Without the greenhouse effect, the entire Earth would plunge below the freezing point of water and we’d all be dead.) Now that atmosphere, so thin and fragile, is under assault by our technology. We are pumping all kinds of stuff into it. You know about the concern that chlorofluorocarbons are depleting the ozone layer; and that carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases are producing global warming, a steady trend amidst fluctuations produced by volcanic eruptions and other sources. Who knows what other challenges we are posing to this vulnerable layer of air that we haven’t been wise enough to foresee?

The inadvertent side effects of technology can challenge the environment on which our very lives depend. That means that we must understand science and technology; we must anticipate long-term consequences in a very clever way—not just the bottom line on the profit-and-loss column for the corporation for this year, but the consequences for the nation and the species 10, 20, 50, 100 years in the future. If we absolutely stop all chlorofluorocarbon and allied chemical production right now (as we’re in fact doing), the ozonosphere will heal itself in about a hundred years. Therefore our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren must suffer through the mistakes that we’ve made. That’s a second reason for science education: the dangers of technology. We must understand them better.

A third reason: origins. Every human culture has devoted some of its intellectual, moral, and material resources to trying to understand where everything comes from—our nation, our species, our planet, our star, our galaxy, our universe. Stop someone on the street and ask about it. You will not find many people who never thought about it, who are incurious about their ultimate origins.

I hold there’s a kind of Gresham’s Law that applies in the confrontation of science and pseudoscience: In the popular imagination, at least, the bad science drives out the good. What I mean is this: If you are awash in lost continents and channeling and UFOs and all the long litany of claims so well exposed in Skeptical Inquirer, you may not have intellectual room for the findings of science. You’re sated with wonder. Our culture in one way produces the fantastic findings of science, and then in another way cuts them off before they reach the average person. So people who are curious, intelligent, dedicated to understanding the world, may nevertheless be (in our view) enmired in superstition and pseudoscience. You could say, Well, they ought to know better, they ought to be more critical, and so on; but that’s too harsh. It’s not very much their fault, I say. It’s the fault of a society that preferentially propagates the baloney and holds back the ambrosia.

The least effective way for skeptics to get the attention of these bright, curious, interested people is to belittle, or condescend, or show arrogance toward their beliefs. They may be credulous, but they’re not stupid. If we bear in mind human frailty and fallibility, we will understand their plight.

For example: I’ve lately been thinking about alien abductions, and false claims of childhood sexual abuse, and stories of satanic ritual abuse in the context of recovered memories. There are interesting similarities among those classes of cases. I think if we are to understand any of them, we must understand all of them. But there’s a maddening tendency of the skeptics, when addressing invented stories of childhood sexual abuse, to forget that real and appalling abuse happens. It is not true that all these claims of childhood sexual abuse are silly and pumped up by unethical therapists. Yesterday’s paper reported that a survey of 13 states found that one-sixth of all the rape victims reported to police are under the age of 12. And this is a category of rape that is preferentially under-reported to police, for obvious reasons. Of these girls, one-fifth were raped by their fathers. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of betrayal. We must bear that in mind when we consider patients who, say, because they have an eating disorder, have suppressed childhood sexual abuse diagnosed by their psychiatrists.

People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. Let us not dismiss pseudoscience or even superstition with contempt.

In the nineteenth century it was mediums: You’d go to the stance, and you’d be put in touch with dead relatives. These days it’s a little different; it’s called channeling. What both are basically about is the human fear of dying. I don’t know about you; I find the idea of dying unpleasant. If I had a choice, at least for a while, I would just as soon not die. Twice in my life I came very close to doing so. (I did not have a near-death experience, I’m sorry to say.) I can understand anxiety about dying.

About 14 years ago both my parents died. We had a very good relationship. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I wouldn’t ask much: I would like five minutes a year with them; to tell them how their kids and their grandchildren are doing, and how Annie and I are doing. I know it sounds stupid, but I’d like to ask them, “Is everything all right with you?” Just a little contact. So I don’t guffaw at women who go to their husbands’ tombstones and chat them up every now and then. That’s not hard to understand. And if we have difficulties on the ontological status of who it is they’re talking to, that’s all right. That’s not what this is about. This is humans being human.

In the alien-abduction context, I’ve been trying to understand the fact that humans hallucinate—that it’s a human commonplace—yes, under conditions of sensory deprivation or drugs or deprival of REM sleep, but also just in the ordinary course of existence. I have, maybe a dozen times since my parents died, heard one of them say my name: just the single word, “Carl.” I miss them; they called me by my first name so much during the time they were alive; I was in the practice of responding instantly when I was called; it has deep psychic roots. So my brain plays it back every now and then. This doesn’t surprise me at all; I sort of like it. But it’s a hallucination. If I were a little less skeptical, though, I could see how easy it would be to say, “They’re around somewhere. I can hear them.”

Raymond Moody, who is an M.D., I think, an author who writes innumerable books on life after death, actually quoted me in the first chapter of his latest book, saying that I heard my parents calling me Carl, and so, look, even he believes in life after death. This badly misses my point. If this is one of the arguments from Chapter 1 of the latest book of a principal exponent of life after death, I suspect that despite our most fervent wishes, the case is weak.

But still, suppose I wasn’t steeped in the virtues of scientific skepticism and felt as I do about my parents, and along comes someone who says, “I can put you in touch with them.” Suppose he’s clever, and found out something about my parents in the past, and is good at faking voices, and so on—a darkened room and incense and all of that. I could see being swept away emotionally.

Would you think less of me if I fell for it? Imagine I was never educated about skepticism, had no idea that it’s a virtue, but instead believed that it was grumpy and negative and rejecting of everything that’s humane. Couldn’t you understand my openness to being conned by a medium or a channeler?

The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them—the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status. Whereas, an approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition, that recognizes that the society has arranged things so that skepticism is not well taught, might be much more widely accepted.^*

If we understand this, then of course we have compassion for the abductees and those who come upon crop circles and believe they’re supernatural, or at least of extraterrestrial manufacture. This is key to making science and the scientific method more attractive, especially to the young, because it’s a battle for the future.

Science involves a seemingly self-contradictory mix of attitudes: On the one hand, it requires an almost complete openness to all ideas, no matter how bizarre and weird they sound, a propensity to wonder. As I walk along, my time slows down; I shrink in the direction of motion, and I get more massive. That’s crazy! On the scale of the very small, the molecule can be in this position, in that position, but it is prohibited from being in any intermediate position. That’s wild! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the second is a consequence of quantum mechanics. Like it or not, that’s the way the world is. If you insist that it’s ridiculous, you will be forever closed to the major findings of science. But at the same time, science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way you can distinguish the right from the wrong, the wheat from the chaff, is by critical experiment and analysis.

Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis—which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism—especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested—and you’re not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need.

It’s no fun, as I said at the beginning, to be on the receiving end of skeptical questioning. But it’s the affordable price we pay for having the benefits of so powerful a tool as science.

Notes

1. If skeptical habits of thought are widely distributed and prized, then who is the skepticism going to be mainly applied to? To those in power. Those in power, therefore, do not have a vested interest in every- body being able to ask searching questions.

Copyright ©1994 by Carl Sagan

A number of his phrases and ideas have insinuated themselves into the culture of science—for example, his spare description of the solar system as “four planets plus debris” and his notion of one day carrying icebergs from the rings of Saturn to the arid wastelands of Mars. He wrote many science books for young people, and as editor of his own science-fiction magazine he made efforts to encourage young writers.

His output was prodigious, approaching 500 volumes, always in his characteristic straightforward, plain-speaking syntax. Part of the reason his Foundation series on the decline of a galactic empire worked so well is that it was based on a close reading of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: A principal theme was the effort to keep science alive as the Dark Ages rolled in.

Asimov spoke out in favor of science and reason and against pseudoscience and superstition. He was not afraid to criticize the U.S. government and was deeply committed to stabilizing world population growth.

The microscopic probe he described in his novel Fantastic Voyage—which could enter the human bloodstream and repair tissue damage—was, sadly, not yet available at the time of his death. As someone born in grinding poverty, and with a lifelong passion to write and explain, Asimov by his own standards led a successful and happy life. In one of his last books he wrote: “My life has just about run its course and I don't really expect to live much longer.” However, he went on, his love for his wife, the psychiatrist Janet Jeppson, and hers for him, sustained him. “It's been a good life, and I am satisfied with it. So please don't worry about me.”

I don't. Instead, I worry about the rest of us, with no Isaac Asimov around to inspire the young to learning and to science.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he said as we waited for my bag. “Isn’t it confusing to have the same name as that science guy?” It took me a moment to understand. Was he pulling my leg? “I am that science guy,” I said. He smiled. “Sorry. That’s my problem. I thought it was yours too.” He put out his hand. “My name is William F. Buckley.” (Well, his name wasn’t exactly William F. Buckley, but he did have the name of a contentious television interviewer, for which he doubtless took a lot of good-natured ribbing.)

As we settled into the car for the long drive, he told me he was glad I was “that science guy”—he had so many questions to ask about science. Would I mind? And so we got to talking. But not about science. He wanted to discuss UFOs, “channeling” (a way to hear what’s on the minds of dead people—not much it turns out), crystals, astrology. . . . He introduced each subject with real enthusiasm, and each time I had to disappoint him: “The evidence is crummy,” I kept saying. “There’s a much simpler explanation.” As we drove on through the rain, I could see him getting glummer. I was attacking not just pseudoscience but also a facet of his inner life.

And yet there is so much in real science that’s equally exciting, more mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge—as well as being a lot closer to the truth. Did he know about the molecular building blocks of life sitting out there in the cold, tenuous gas between the stars? Had he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in four-million-year-old volcanic ash? What about the raising of the Himalayas when India went crashing into Asia? Or how viruses subvert cells, or the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or the ancient civilization of Ebla? Mr. “Buckley”—well-spoken, intelligent, curious—had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science got filtered out before it reached him. What society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. And it had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation.

All over America there are smart, even gifted, people who have a built-in passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. A recent survey suggests that 94 percent of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.”

A Prescription for Disaster

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster. It’s dangerous and stupid for us to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If the United States can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will drift out of the United States and transfer a little prosperity to another part of the world. Because of the low birthrate in the sixties and seventies, the National Science Foundation projects a shortage of nearly a million professional scientists and engineers by 2010. Where will they come from? What about fusion, supercomputers, abortion, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, high-resolution television, airline and airport safety, food additives, animal rights, superconductivity, Midgetman vs. rail-garrison MX missiles, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer? How can we decide national policy if we don’t understand the underlying issues?

I know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring good deeds out into the world. Scientists not only conceived nuclear weapons; they also took political leaders by the lapels, arguing that their nation—whichever it happened to be—had to have one first. Then they arranged to manufacture 60,000 of them. Our technology has produced thalidomide, CFCs, Agent Orange, nerve gas, and industries so powerful they can ruin the climate of the planet. There’s a reason people are nervous about science and technology.

And so the image of the mad scientist haunts our world—from Dr. Faust to Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Strangelove to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning children’s television. (All this doesn’t inspire budding scientists.) But there’s no way back. We can’t just conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed the world. The sword of science is double-edged. Rather, its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility—more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.

Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.

How Bad Is It? Very Bad

“It’s Official,” reads one newspaper headline. “We Stink in Science.” Less than half of all Americans know that the earth moves around the sun and takes a year to do it—a fact established a few centuries ago. In tests of average 17-year-olds in many world regions, the United States ranked dead last in algebra. On identical tests, the U.S. kids averaged 43 percent and their Japanese counterparts 78 percent. In my book 78 percent is pretty good—it corresponds to a C+, or maybe even a B-; 43 percent is an F. In a chemistry test, students in only two of thirteen nations did worse than the United States. Compared to us, Britain, Singapore, and Hong Kong were so high they were almost off-scale, and 25 percent of Canadian 18-year-olds knew just as much chemistry as a select 1 percent of American high school seniors (in their secondary chemistry course, and most of them in “advanced” programs). The best of 20 fifth-grade classrooms in Minneapolis was outpaced by every one of 20 classrooms in Sendai, Japan, and 19 out of 20 in Taipei, Taiwan. South Korean students were far ahead of American students in all aspects of mathematics and science, and 13-year-olds in British Columbia (in western Canada) outpaced their U.S. counterparts across the board (in some areas they did better than the Koreans). Of the U.S. kids, 22 percent say they dislike school; only 8 percent of the Koreans do. Yet two-thirds of the Americans, but only a quarter of the Koreans, say they are “good at mathematics.”

Why We’re Flunking

How do British Columbia, Japan, Britain, and Korea manage so much better than we do?

During the Great Depression, teachers enjoyed job security, good salaries, respectability. Teaching was an admired profession, partly because learning was widely recognized as the road out of poverty. Little of that is true today. And so science (and other) teaching is too often incompetently or uninspiringly done, its practitioners, astonishingly, having little or no training in their subjects—sometimes themselves unable to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Those who do have the training often get higher-paying jobs elsewhere.

We need more money for teachers’ training and salaries, and for laboratories—so kids will get hands-on experience rather than just reading what’s in the book. But all across America, school-bond issues on the ballot are regularly defeated. U.S. parents are much more satisfied with what their children are learning in science and math than are, say, Japanese and Taiwanese parents—whose children are doing so much better. No one suggests that property taxes be used to provide for the also limit the amount of mind-numbing television their children watch.

What We Can Do

Those in America with the most favorable view of science tend to be young, well-to-do, college-educated white males. But three-quarters of new American workers between now and 2001 will be women, nonwhites, and immigrants. Discriminating against them isn’t only unjust, it’s also self-defeating. It deprives the American economy of desperately needed skilled workers.

Black and Hispanic students are doing better in standardized science tests now than in the late 1960s, but they’re the only ones who are. The average math gap between white and black U.S. high school graduates is still huge—two to three grade levels; but the gap between white U.S. high school graduates and those in, say, Japan, Canada, Great Britain, or Finland is more than twice as big. If you’re poorly motivated and poorly educated, you won’t know much—no mystery here. Suburban blacks with college-educated parents do just as well in college as suburban whites with college-educated parents. Enrolling a poor child in a Head Start program doubles his or her chances to be employed later in life; one who completes an Upward Bound program is four times as likely to get a college education. If we’re serious, we know what to do.

What about college and university? There are obvious steps similar to what should be done in high schools: salaries for teachers that approach what they could get in industry; more scholarships, fellowships, and laboratory equipment; laboratory science courses required of everyone to graduate; and special attention paid to those traditionally steered away from science. We should also provide the financial and moral encouragement for academic scientists to spend more time on public education—lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, television appearances. This requires scientists to make themselves understandable and fun to listen to. To me, it seems strange that some scientists, who depend on public funding for their research, are reluctant to explain to the public what it is that they do. Fortunately, the number of scientists willing to speak to the public—and capably—has been increasing each year. But there are not yet nearly enough.

Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have a daily science column? When I was growing up, my father would bring home a daily paper and consume (often with great gusto) the baseball box scores. There they were, to me as dry as dust, with obscure abbreviations (W, SS, SO, WL, AB, RBI), but they spoke to him. Newspapers everywhere printed them. I figured maybe they weren’t too hard for me. Eventually I got caught up in the world of baseball statistics. (I know it helped me in learning decimals.)

Or take a look at the financial pages. Any introductory material? Explanatory footnotes? Definitions of abbreviations? Often there’s none. It’s sink or swim. Look at those acres of statistics! Yet people voluntarily read the stuff. It’s not beyond their ability. It’s only a matter of motivation. Why can’t we do the same with math, science, and technology?

By far the most effective means of raising interest in science is television. There’s lots of pseudoscience on television, a fair amount of medicine and technology, but hardly any science—especially on the three big commercial networks, whose executives think science programming means rating declines and lost profits, and nothing else matters. Why in all America is there no television drama that has as its hero someone devoted to figuring out how the universe works?

Stirring projects in science and technology attract and inspire youngsters. The number of science Ph.D.’s peaked around the time of the Apollo program and declined thereafter. This is an important potential side-effect of such projects as sending humans to Mars, the Superconducting Supercollider to explore the fine structure of matter, and the program to map all human genes.

Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to teach a class in kindergarten or the first grade. Many of these children are curious, intellectually vigorous, ask provocative and insightful questions, and exhibit great enthusiasm for science. When I talk to high school students, I find something different. They memorize “facts.” But, by and large, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’re worried about asking “dumb” questions; they’re willing to accept inadequate answers; they don’t pose follow-up questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second by second, the approval of their peers. Something has happened between first and twelfth grade, and it’s not just puberty. I’d guess that it’s partly peer pressure not to excel (except in sports); partly that society teaches short-term gratification; partly the impression that science or math won’t buy you a sports car; partly that so little is expected of students; and partly that there are so few role models for intelligent discussion of science and technology or for learning for its own sake.

But there’s something else: Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions. Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole, or when is the world’s birthday, or why we have toes. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys many adults. A few more experiences like this, and another child has been lost to science.

There are many better responses. If we have an idea of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don’t, we could go to the encyclopedia or the library. Or we might say to the child: “I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.”

But mere encouragement isn’t enough. We must also give the children the tools to winnow the wheat from the chaff. I’m haunted by the vision of a generation of Americans unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, hopefully clutching their crystals for comfort, unequipped even to frame the right questions or to recognize the answers. I want us to rescue Mr. “Buckley” and the millions like him. I also want us to stop turning out leaden, incurious, unimaginative high school seniors. I think America needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Public understanding of science is more central to our national security than half a dozen strategic weapons systems. The sub-mediocre performance of American youngsters in science and math, and the widespread adult ignorance and apathy about science and math, should sound an urgent alarm.

Copyright ©1989 by Carl Sagan

Now this is not something that you have to go through four years of graduate school to understand. Everybody understands this. The trouble is, a used car is one thing but television commercials or pronouncements by presidents and party leaders are another. We are skeptical in some areas but unfortunately not in others.

For example, there is a class of aspirin commercials that reveals the competing product to have only so much of the painkilling ingredient that doctors recommend most—they don’t tell you what the mysterious ingredient is—whereas their product has a dramatically larger amount (1.2 to 2 times more per tablet). Therefore you should buy their product. But why not just take two of the competing tablets? You’re not supposed to ask. Don’t apply skepticism to this issue. Don’t think. Buy.

Such claims in commercial advertisements constitute small deceptions. They part us from a little money, or induce us to buy a slightly inferior product. It’s not so terrible. But consider this:

I have here the program of this year’s Whole Life Expo in San Francisco. Twenty thousand people attended last year’s program. Here are some of the presentations: “Alternative Treatments for AIDS Patients: It will rebuild one’s natural defenses and prevent immune system breakdowns—learn about the latest developments that the media has thus far ignored.” It seems to me that presentation could do real harm. “How Trapped Blood Proteins Produce Pain and Suffering.” “Crystals, Are They Talismans or Stones?“ (I have an opinion myself.) It says, “As a crystal focuses sound and light waves for radio and television”—crystal sets are rather a long time ago—”so may it amplify spiritual vibrations for the attuned human.” I’ll bet very few of you are attuned. Or here’s one: “Return of the Goddess, a Presentational Ritual.” Another: “Synchronicity, the Recognition Experience.” That one is given by “Brother Charles.” Or, on the next page, “You, Saint-Germain, and Healing Through the Violet Flame.” It goes on and on, with lots of ads about “opportunities”—ranging from the dubious to the spurious—that are available at the Whole Life Expo.

If you were to drop down on Earth at any time during the tenure of humans you would find a set of popular, more or less similar, belief systems. They change, often very quickly, often on time scales of a few years: But sometimes belief systems of this sort last for many thousands of years. At least a few are always available. I think it’s fair to ask why. We are Homo sapiens. That’s the distinguishing characteristic about us, that sapiens part. We’re supposed to be smart. So why is this stuff always with us? Well, for one thing, a great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society. There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.

There may be more such failings in our society than in many others in human history. And so it is reasonable for people to poke around and try on for size various belief systems, to see if they help.

For example, take a fashionable fad, channeling. It has for its fundamental premise, as does spiritualism, that when we die we don’t exactly disappear, that some part of us continues. That part, we are told, can reenter the bodies of human and other beings in the future, and so death loses much of its sting for us personally. What is more, we have an opportunity, if the channeling contentions are true, to make contact with loved ones who have died.

Speaking personally, I would be delighted if reincarnation were real. I lost my parents, both of them, in the past few years, and I would love to have a little conversation with them, to tell them what the kids are doing, make sure everything is all right wherever it is they are. That touches something very deep. But at the same time, precisely for that reason, I know that there are people who will try to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the bereaved. The spiritualists and the channelers better have a compelling case.

Or take the idea that by thinking hard at geological formations you can tell where mineral or petroleum deposits are. Uri Geller makes this claim. Now if you are an executive of a mineral exploration or petroleum company, your bread and butter depends on finding the minerals or the oil; so spending trivial amounts of money, compared with what you usually spend on geological exploration, this time to find deposits psychically, sounds not so bad. You might be tempted.

Or take UFOs, the contention that beings in spaceships from other worlds are visiting us all the time. I find that a thrilling idea. It’s at least a break from the ordinary. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my scientific life working on the issue of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Think how much effort I could save if those guys are coming here. But when we recognize some emotional vulnerability regarding a claim, that is exactly where we have to make the firmest efforts at skeptical scrutiny. That is where we can be had.

Now, let’s reconsider channeling. There is a woman in the State of Washington who claims to make contact with a 35,000-year-old somebody, “Ramtha”—he, by the way, speaks English very well with what sounds to me to be an Indian accent. Suppose we had Ramtha here and just suppose Ramtha is cooperative. We could ask some questions: How do we know that Ramtha lived 35,000 years ago? Who is keeping track of the intervening millennia? How does it come to be exactly 35,000 years? That’s a very round number. Thirty-five thousand plus or minus what? What were things like 35,000 years ago? What was the climate? Where on Earth did Ramtha live? (I know he speaks English with an Indian accent, but where was that?) What does Ramtha eat? (Archaeologists know something about what people ate back then.) We would have a real opportunity to find out if his claims are true. If this were really somebody from 35,000 years ago, you could learn a lot about 35,000 years ago. So, one way or another, either Ramtha really is 35,000 years old, in which case we discover something about that period—that’s before the Wisconsin Ice Age, an interesting time—or he’s a phony and he’ll slip up. What are the indigenous languages, what is the social structure, who else does Ramtha live with—children, grandchildren—what’s the life cycle, the infant mortality, what clothes does he wear, what’s his life expectancy, what are the weapons, plants, and animals? Tell us. Instead, what we hear are the most banal homilies, indistinguishable from those that alleged UFO occupants tell the poor humans who claim to have been abducted by them.

Occasionally, by the way, I get a letter from someone who is in “contact” with an extraterrestrial who invites me to “ask anything.” And so I have a list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, “Please give a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat’s Last Theorem, so I write out the little equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like “Should we humans be good?” I always get an answer. I think something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions. Anything vague they are extremely happy to respond to, but anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything, there is only silence.

The French scientist Henri Poincaré remarked on why credulity is rampant: “We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.” That’s what I have tried to say with my examples. But I don’t think that’s the only reason credulity is rampant. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, let’s say high school students, the habit of being skeptical, perhaps they will not restrict their skepticism to aspirin commercials and 35,000-year-old channelers (or channelees). Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Then where will we be? Skepticism is dangerous. That’s exactly its function, in my view. It is the business of skepticism to be dangerous. And that’s why there is a great reluctance to teach it in the schools. That’s why you don’t find a general fluency in skepticism in the media. On the other hand, how will we negotiate a very perilous future if we don’t have the elementary intellectual tools to ask searching questions of those nominally in charge, especially in a democracy?

I think this is a useful moment to reflect on the sort of national trouble that could have been avoided were skepticism more generally available in American society. The Iran/Nicaragua fiasco is so obvious an example I will not take advantage of our poor, beleaguered president by spelling it out. The Administration’s resistance to a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and its continuing passion for blowing up nuclear weapons—one of the major drivers of the nuclear arms race—under the pretense of making us “safe” is another such issue. So is Star Wars. The habits of skeptical thought CSICOP encourages have relevance for matters of the greatest importance to the nation. There is enough nonsense promulgated by both political parties that the habit of evenhanded skepticism should be declared a national goal, essential for our survival.

I want to say a little more about the burden of skepticism. You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. This is a potential social danger present in an organization like CSICOP. We have to guard carefully against it.

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, which ever one it is, you’re in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.

Really good scientists do both. On their own, talking to themselves, they churn up huge numbers of new ideas, and criticize them ruthlessly. Most of the ideas never make it to the outside world. Only the ideas that pass through a rigorous self-filtration make it out and are criticized by the rest of the scientific community. It sometimes happens that ideas that are accepted by everybody turn out to be wrong, or at least partially wrong, or at least superseded by ideas of greater generality. And, while there are of course some personal losses—emotional bonds to the idea that you yourself played a role in inventing—nevertheless the collective ethic is that every time such an idea is overthrown and replaced by something better the enterprise of science has benefited. In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that has happened in politics or religion. It’s very rare that a senator, say, replies, “That’s a good argument. I will now change my political affiliation.”

I would like to say a few things about the stimulating sessions on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and on animal language at our CSICOP conference. In the history of science there is an instructive procession of major intellectual battles that turn out, all of them, to be about how central human beings are. We could call them battles about the anti-Copernican conceit.

Here are some of the issues:

• We are the center of the universe. All the planets and the stars and the Sun and the Moon go around us. (Boy, must we be something really special.)

That was the prevailing belief—Aristarchus aside—until the time of Copernicus. A lot of people liked it because it gave them a personally unwarranted central position in the universe. The mere fact that you were on Earth made you privileged. That felt good. Then along came the evidence that Earth was just a planet and that those other bright moving points of light were planets too. Disappointing. Even depressing. Better when we were central and unique.

• But at least our Sun is at the center of the universe. No, those other stars, they’re suns too, and what’s more we’re out in the galactic boondocks. We are nowhere near the center of the galaxy. Very depressing.
• Well, at least the Milky Way galaxy is at the center of the universe. Then a little more progress in science. We find there isn’t any such thing as the center of the universe. What’s more there are a hundred billion other galaxies. Nothing special about this one. Deep gloom.
• Well, at least we humans, we are the pinnacle of creation. We’re separate. All those other creatures, plants and animals, they’re lower. We’re higher. We have no connection with them. Every living thing has been created separately. Then along comes Darwin. We find an evolutionary continuum. We’re closely connected to the other beasts and vegetables. What’s more, the closest biological relatives to us are chimpanzees. Those are our close relatives—those guys? It’s an embarrassment. Did you ever go to the zoo and watch them? Do you know what they do? Imagine in Victorian England, when Darwin produced this insight, what an awkward truth it was.

There are other important examples—privileged reference frames in physics and the unconscious mind in psychology—that I’ll pass over. I maintain that in the tradition of this long set of debates—every one of which was won by the Copernicans, by the guys who say there is not much special about us—there was a deep emotional undercurrent in the debates in both CSICOP sessions I mentioned. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the analysis of possible animal “language” strike at one of the last remaining pre-Copernican belief systems:

• At least we are the most intelligent creatures in the whole universe. If there are no other smart guys elsewhere, even if we are connected to chimpanzees, even if we are in the boondocks of a vast and awesome universe, at least there is still something special about us. But the moment we find extraterrestrial intelligence that last bit of conceit is gone. I think some of the resistance to the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence is due to the anti-Copernican conceit. Likewise, without taking sides in the debate on whether other animals—higher primates, especially great apes—are intelligent or have language, that’s clearly, on an emotional level, the same issue. If we define humans as creatures who have language and no one else has language, at least we are unique in that regard. But if it turns out that all those dirty, repugnant, laughable chimpanzees can also, with Ameslan or otherwise, communicate ideas, then what is left that is special about us? Propelling emotional predispositions on these issues are present, often unconsciously, in scientific debates. It is important to realize that scientific debates, just like pseudoscientific debates, can be awash with emotion, for these among many different reasons.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence. How is this different from pseudoscience? Let me give a couple of real cases. In the early sixties, the Soviets held a press conference in Moscow in which they announced that a distant radio source, called CTA-102, was varying sinusoidally, like a sine wave, with a period of about 100 days. Why did they call a press conference to announce that a distant radio source was varying? Because they thought it was an extraterrestrial civilization of immense powers. That is worth calling a press conference for. This was before even the word “quasar” existed. Today we know that CTA-102 is a quasar. We don’t know very well what quasars are; and there is more than one mutually exclusive explanation for them in the scientific literature. Nevertheless, few seriously consider that a quasar, like CTA-102, is some galaxy-girdling extraterrestrial civilization, because there are a number of alternative explanations of their properties that are more or less consistent with the physical laws we know without invoking alien life. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is a hypothesis of last resort. Only if everything else fails do you reach for it.

Second example: British scientists in 1967 found a nearby bright radio source that is fluctuating on a much shorter time scale, with a period constant to ten significant figures. What was it? Their first thought was that it was something like a message being sent to us, or an interstellar navigational beacon for spacecraft that ply the spaces between the stars. They even gave it, among themselves at Cambridge University, the wry designation LGM-1—Little Green Men, LGM. However (they were wiser than the Soviets), they did not call a press conference, and it soon became clear that what we had here was what is now called a “pulsar.” In fact it was the first pulsar, the Crab Nebula pulsar. Well, what’s a pulsar? A pulsar is a star shrunk to the size of a city, held up as no other stars are, not by gas pressure, not by electron degeneracy, but by nuclear forces. It is in a certain sense an atomic nucleus the size of Pasadena. Now that, I maintain, is an idea at least as bizarre as an interstellar navigational beacon. The answer to what a pulsar is has to be something mighty strange. It isn’t an extraterrestrial civilization, it’s something else; but a something else that opens our eyes and our minds and indicates possibilities in nature that we had never guessed at.

Then there is the question of false positives. Frank Drake in his original Ozma experiment, Paul Horowitz in the META (Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay) program sponsored by the Planetary Society, the Ohio University group and many other groups have all had anomalous signals that make the heart palpitate. They think for a moment that they have picked up a genuine signal. In some cases we have not the foggiest idea what it was; the signals did not repeat. The next night you turn the same telescope to the same spot in the sky with the same modulation and the same frequency and bandpass, everything else the same, and you don’t hear a thing. You don’t publish that data. It may be a malfunction in the detection system. It may be a military AWACS plane flying by and broadcasting on frequency channels that are supposed to be reserved for radio astronomy. It may be a diathermy machine down the street. There are many possibilities. You don’t immediately declare that you have found extraterrestrial intelligence because you find an anomalous signal.

And if it were repeated, would you then announce? You would not. Maybe it’s a hoax. Maybe it is something you haven’t been smart enough to figure out that is happening to your system. Instead, you would then call scientists at a bunch of other radio telescopes and say that at this particular spot in the sky, at this frequency and bandpass and modulation and all the rest, you seem to be getting something funny. Could they please look at it and see if they get something similar? And only if several independent observers get the same kind of information from the same spot in the sky do you think you have something. Even then you don’t know that the something is extraterrestrial intelligence, but at least you could determine that it’s not something on Earth. (And that it’s also not something in Earth orbit; it’s further away than that.) That’s the first sequence of events that would be required to be sure that you actually had a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Now notice that there is a certain discipline involved. Skepticism imposes a burden. You can’t just go off shouting “little green men,” because you are going to look mighty silly, as the Soviets did with CTA-102, when it turns out to be something quite different. A special caution is necessary when the stakes are as high as here. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It’s okay not to be sure.

I’m often asked the question, “Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments—there are a lot of places out there, and use the word billions, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I’m asked, “Yeah, but what do you really think?” I say, “I just told you what I really think.” “Yeah, but what’s your gut feeling?” But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

After my article “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” came out in Parade (Feb. 1, 1987), I got, as you might imagine, a lot of letters. Sixty-five million people read Parade. In the article I gave a long list of things that I said were “demonstrated or presumptive baloney”—thirty or forty items. Advocates of all those positions were uniformly offended, so I got lots of letters. I also gave a set of very elementary prescriptions about how to think about baloney—arguments from authority don’t work, every step in the chain of evidence has to be valid, and so on. Lots of people wrote back, saying, “You’re absolutely right on the generalities; unfortunately that doesn’t apply to my particular doctrine.” For example, one letter writer said the idea that intelligent life exists outside the Earth is an excellent example of baloney. He concluded, “I am as sure of this as of anything in my experience. There is no conscious life anywhere else in the universe. Mankind thus returns to its rightful position as center of the universe.”

Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven’t ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can’t be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.

I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It’s a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it’s not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.

If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham’s Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Copyright ©1987 by Carl Sagan

The serpent was, in fact, of a large and conveniently docile variety, procured for this purpose earlier in Macedonia, and outfitted with a linen head of somewhat human countenance. The room was dimly lit. Because of the press of the crowd, no visitor could stay for very long or inspect the serpent very carefully. The opinion of the multitude was that the seer had indeed delivered a god.

Alexander then pronounced the god ready to answer written questions delivered in sealed envelopes. When alone, he would lift off or duplicate the seal, read the message, remake the envelope, and attach a response. People flocked from all over the Empire to witness this marvel, an oracular serpent with the head of a man. In those cases where the oracle later proved not just ambiguous but grossly wrong, Alexander had a simple solution: He altered his record of the response he had given. And if the question of a rich man or woman revealed some weakness or guilty secret, Alexander did not scruple at extortion. The result of all this imposture was an income equivalent today to several hundred thousand dollars per year and fame rivaled by few men of his time.

We may smile at Alexander the Oracle-Monger. Of course we all would like to foretell the future and make contact with the gods. But we would not nowadays be taken in by such a fraud. Or would we? M. Lamar Keene spent thirteen years as a spiritualist medium. He was pastor of the New Age Assembly Church in Tampa, a trustee of the Universal Spiritualist Association, and for many years a leading figure in the mainstream of the American spiritualist movement. He is also a self-confessed fraud who believes, from first-hand knowledge, that virtually all spirit readings, séances, and mediumistic messages from the dead are conscious deceptions, contrived to exploit the grief and longing we feel for deceased friends and relatives. Keene, like Alexander, would answer questions given to him in sealed envelopes—in this case not in private, but on the pulpit. He viewed the contents with a concealed bright lamp or by smearing lighter fluid, either of which can render the envelope momentarily transparent. He would find lost objects, present people with astounding revelations about their private lives which “no one could know,” commune with the spirits and materialize ectoplasm in the darkness of the séance—all based on the simplest tricks, an unswerving self-confidence, and most of all on the monumental credulity, the utter lack of skepticism he found in his parishioners and clients. Keene believes, as did Harry Houdini, that not only is such fraud rampant among the spiritualists but also that they are highly organized to exchange data on potential clients in order to make the revelations of the séance more astonishing. Like the viewing of Alexander's serpent, the séances all take place in darkened rooms—because the deception would be too easily penetrated in the light. In his peak earning years, Keene earned about as much, in equivalent purchasing power, as Alexander of Abonutichus.

From Alexander's time to our own—indeed, probably for as long as human beings have inhabited this planet—people have discovered they could make money by pretending to arcane or occult knowledge. A charming and enlightening account of some of these bamboozles can be found in a remarkable book published in 1852 in London, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay. Bernard Baruch claimed that the book saved him millions of dollars—presumably by alerting him to which idiot schemes he should not invest his money in. Mackay's treatment ranges from alchemy, prophecy, and faith healing, to haunted houses, the Crusades, and the “influence of politics and religion on the hair and beard.” The value of the book, like the account of Alexander the Oracle-Monger, lies in the remoteness of the frauds and delusions described. Many of the impostures do not have a contemporary ring and only weakly engage our passions: It becomes clear how people in other times were deceived. But after reading many such cases, we begin to wonder what the comparable contemporary versions are. People's feelings are as strong as they always were, and skepticism is probably as unfashionable today as in any other age. Accordingly, there ought to be bamboozles galore in contemporary society. And there are.

In the past hundred years—whether for good or for ill—science has emerged in the popular mind as the primary means of penetrating the secrets of the universe, so we should expect many contemporary bamboozles to have a scientific ring. And they do.

Within the last century or so, many claims have been made at the edge or border of science—assertions that excite popular interest and, in many cases, that would be of profound scientific importance if only they were true. These claims are out of the ordinary, a break from the humdrum world, and often imply something hopeful: for example, that we have vast, untapped powers, or that unseen forces are about to save us from ourselves, or that there is a still unacknowledged pattern and harmony to the universe. Well, science does sometimes make such claims—as, for example, the realization that the hereditary information we pass from generation to generation is encoded in a single long molecule called DNA, in the discovery of universal gravitation or continental drift, in the tapping of nuclear energy, in research on the origin of life or on the early history of the universe. So if some additional claim is made—for example, that it is possible to float in the air unaided, by a special effort of will—what is so different about that? Nothing. Except for the matter of proof. Those who claim that levitation occurs have an obligation to demonstrate their contention before skeptics, under controlled conditions. The burden of proof is on them, not on those who might be dubious. Such claims are too important to think about carelessly. Many assertions about levitation have been made in the past hundred years, but motion pictures of well-illuminated people rising unassisted fifteen feet into the air have never been taken under conditions which exclude fraud. If levitation were possible, its scientific and, more generally, its human implications would be enormous. Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect from us the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter.

One of the most striking apparent instances of extrasensory perception is the precognitive experience, when a person has a compelling perception of an imminent disaster, the death of a loved one, or a communication from a long-lost friend, and the predicted event then occurs. Many who have had such experiences report that the emotional intensity of the precognition and its subsequent verification provide an overpowering sense of contact with another realm of reality. I have had such an experience myself. Many years ago I awoke in the dead of night in a cold sweat, with the certain knowledge that a close relative had suddenly died. I was so gripped with the haunting intensity of the experience that I was afraid to place a long-distance phone call, for fear that the relative would trip over the telephone cord (or something) and make the experience a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, the relative is alive and well, and whatever psychological roots the experience may have, it was not a reflection of an imminent event in the real world.

However, suppose the relative had in fact died that night. You would have had a difficult time convincing me that it was merely coincidence. But it is easy to calculate that, if each American has such a premonitory experience a few times in his lifetime, the actuarial statistics alone will produce a few apparent precognitive events somewhere in America each year. We can calculate that this must occur fairly frequently, but to the rare person who dreams of disaster, followed rapidly by its realization, it is uncanny and awesome. Such a coincidence must happen to someone every few months. But those who experience a correct precognition understandably resist its explanation by coincidence.

After my experience I did not write a letter to an institute of parapsychology relating a compelling predictive dream which was not borne out by reality. That is not a memorable letter. But had the death I dreamt actually occurred, such a letter would have been marked down as evidence of precognition. The hits are recorded, the misses are not. Thus human nature unconsciously conspires to produce a biased reporting of the frequency of such events.

Precognitive dreams are typical of claims made on the boundary or edge of science. An amazing assertion is made, something out of the ordinary, marvelous, or awesome—or at least not tedious. It survives superficial scrutiny by lay people and, sometimes, more detailed study and more impressive endorsement by celebrities and scientists. Those who accept the validity of the assertion resist all attempts at conventional explanation. The most common correct explanations are of two sorts. One is conscious fraud, usually by those with a financial interest in the outcome. Those who accept the phenomena have been bamboozled. The other explanation often applies when the phenomena are uncommonly subtle and complex, when nature is more intricate than we have guessed, when deeper study is required for understanding. Many precognitive dreams fit this second explanation. Here, very often, we bamboozle ourselves.

I make a distinction between those who perpetrate and promote borderline belief systems and those who accept them. The latter are often taken by the novelty of the systems and the feeling of insight and grandeur they provide. These are in fact scientific attitudes and scientific goals. It is easy to imagine extraterrestrial visitors who looked like human beings, flew space vehicles and even airplanes like our own, and taught our ancestors civilization. This does not strain our imaginative powers overly and is sufficiently similar to familiar Western religious stories to seem comfortable. The search for Martian microbes of exotic biochemistry, or for interstellar radio messages from intelligent beings biologically very dissimilar, is more difficult to grasp and not as comforting. The former view is widely purveyed and available; the latter much less so. Yet I think many of those excited by the idea of ancient astronauts are motivated by sincere scientific (and occasionally religious) feelings. There is a vast untapped popular interest in the deepest scientific questions. For many people, the shoddily thought out doctrines of borderline science are the closest approximation to comprehensible science readily available. The popularity of borderline science is a rebuke to the schools, the press, and commercial television for their sparse, unimaginative, and ineffective efforts at science education; and to us scientists for doing so little to popularize our subject.

Flying saucers, or UFOs, are well known to almost everyone. But seeing a strange light in the sky does not mean that we are being visited by beings from the planet Venus or a distant galaxy named Spectra. It might, for example, be an automobile headlight reflected off a high-altitude cloud, or a flight of luminescent insects, or an unconventional aircraft, or a conventional aircraft with unconventional lighting patterns, such as a high-intensity searchlight used for meteorological observations. There are also a number of cases—closer encounters with some highish index numeral—where one or two people claim to have been taken aboard an alien spaceship, prodded and probed with unconventional medical instruments, and released. But in these cases we have only the unsubstantiated testimony, no matter how heartfelt and seemingly sincere, of one or two people. To the best of my knowledge there are no instances out of the hundreds of thousands of UFO reports filed since 1947—not a single one—in which many people independently and reliably report a close encounter with what is clearly an alien spacecraft.

Not only is there an absence of good anecdotal evidence; there is no physical evidence either. Our laboratories are very sophisticated. A product of alien manufacture might readily be identified as such. Yet no one has ever turned up even a small fragment of an alien spacecraft that has passed any such physical test—much less the logbook of the starship captain. It is for these reasons that in 1977 NASA declined an invitation from the Executive Office of the President to undertake a serious investigation of UFO reports. When hoaxes and mere anecdotes are excluded, there seems to be nothing left to study.

Once I spied a bright, “hovering” UFO, and pointing it out to some friends in a restaurant soon found myself in the midst of a throng of patrons, waitresses, cooks, and proprietors milling about on the sidewalk, pointing up into the sky with fingers and forks and making gasps of astonishment. People were somewhere between delighted and awestruck. But when I returned with a pair of binoculars which clearly showed the UFO to be an unconventional aircraft (a NASA weather airplane, as it later turned out), there was uniform disappointment. Some felt embarrassed at the public exposure of their credulity. Others were simply disappointed at the evaporation of a good story, something out of the ordinary—a visitor from another world.

In many such cases we are not unbiased observers. We have an emotional stake in the outcome—perhaps merely because the borderline belief-system, if true, makes the world a more interesting place; but perhaps because there is something there that strikes more deeply into the human psyche. If astral projection actually occurs, then it is possible for some thinking and perceiving part of me to leave my body and effortlessly travel to other places—an exhilarating prospect. If spiritualism is real, then my soul will survive the death of my body—possibly a comforting thought. If there is extrasensory perception, then many of us possess latent talents that need only be tapped to make us more powerful than we are. If astrology is right, then our personalities and destinies are intimately tied to the rest of the cosmos. If elves and goblins and fairies truly exist (there is a lovely Victorian picture book showing photographs of six-inch-high undraped ladies with gossamer wings conversing with Victorian gentlemen), then the world is a more intriguing place than most adults have been led to believe. If we are now being or in historical times have been visited by representatives from advanced and benign extraterrestrial civilizations, perhaps the human predicament is not so dire as it seems; perhaps the extraterrestrials will save us from ourselves. But the fact that these propositions charm or stir us does not guarantee their truth. Their truth depends only on whether the evidence is compelling; and my own, and sometimes reluctant, judgment is that compelling evidence for these and many similar propositions simply does not (at least as yet) exist.

What is more, many of these doctrines, if false, are pernicious. In simplistic popular astrology we judge people by one of twelve character types depending on their month of birth. But if the typing is false, we do an injustice to the people we are typing. We place them in previously collected pigeonholes and do not judge them for themselves, a typing familiar in sexism and racism.

Those skeptical of many borderline belief-systems are not necessarily those afraid of novelty. For example, many of my colleagues and I are deeply interested in the possibility of life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets. But we must be careful not to foist our wishes and fears upon the cosmos. Instead, in the usual scientific tradition, our objective is to find out what the answers really are, independent of our emotional predispositions. If we are alone, that is a truth worth knowing also. No one would be more delighted than I if intelligent extraterrestrials were visiting our planet. It would make my job enormously easier. Indeed, I have spent more time than I care to think about on the UFO and ancient astronaut questions. And public interest in these matters is, I believe, at least in part, a good thing. But our openness to the dazzling possibilities presented by modern science must be tempered by some hard-nosed skepticism. Many interesting possibilities simply turn out to be wrong. An openness to new possibilities and a willingness to ask hard questions are both required to advance our knowledge.

Professional scientists generally have to make a choice in their research goals. There are some objectives that would be very important if achieved but promise so small a likelihood of success that no one is willing to pursue them. (For many years this was the case in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The situation has changed mainly because advances in radio technology now permit us to construct enormous radio telescopes with sensitive receivers to pick up any messages that might be sent our way. Never before in human history was this possible.) There are other scientific objectives that are perfectly tractable but of entirely trivial significance. Most scientists choose a middle course. As a result, very few scientists actually plunge into the murky waters of testing or challenging borderline or pseudoscientific beliefs. The chance of finding out something really interesting—except about human nature—seems small, and the amount of time required seems large. I believe that scientists should spend more time in discussing these issues, but the fact that a given contention lacks vigorous scientific opposition in no way implies that scientists think it is reasonable.

There are many cases where the belief system is so absurd that scientists dismiss it instantly but never commit their arguments to print. I believe this is a mistake. Science, especially today, depends upon public support. Because most people have, unfortunately, a very inadequate knowledge of science and technology, intelligent decision-making on scientific issues is difficult. Some pseudoscience is a profitable enterprise, and there are proponents who not only are strongly identified with the issue in question but also make large amounts of money from it. They are willing to commit major resources to defending their contentions. Some scientists seem unwilling to engage in public confrontations on borderline-science issues because of the effort required and the possibility that they will be perceived to lose a public debate. But it is an excellent opportunity to show how science works at its murkier borders, and also a way to convey something of its power as well as its pleasures.

There is stodgy immobility on both sides of the borders of the scientific enterprise. Scientific aloofness and opposition to novelty are as much a problem as public gullibility. A distinguished scientist once threatened to sic then Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew on me if I persisted in organizing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which both proponents and opponents of the extraterrestrial-spacecraft hypothesis of UFO origins would be permitted to speak. Scientists offended by the conclusions of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision and irritated by Velikovsky's total ignorance of many well-established scientific facts successfully and shamefully pressured Velikovsky's publisher to abandon the book—which was then put out by another firm, much to its profit—and when I arranged for a second AAAS symposium to discuss Velikovsky's ideas, I was criticized by a different leading scientist who argued that any public attention, no matter how negative, could only aid Velikovsky's cause.

But these symposia were held, the audiences seemed to find them interesting, the proceedings were published, and now youngsters in Duluth or Fresno can find some books presenting the other side of the issue in their libraries. If science is presented poorly in schools and the media, perhaps some interest can be aroused by well-prepared, comprehensible public discussions at the edge of science. Astrology can be used for discussions of astronomy; alchemy for chemistry; Velikovskian catastrophism and lost continents such as Atlantis for geology; and spiritualism and Scientology for a wide range of issues in psychology and psychiatry.

Scientists are, of course, human. When their passions are excited they may abandon temporarily the ideals of their discipline. But these ideals, the scientific method, have proved enormously effective. Finding out the way the world really works requires a mix of hunches, intuition, and brilliant creativity; it also requires skeptical scrutiny of every step. It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. In my opinion the claims of borderline science pall in comparison with hundreds of recent activities and discoveries in real science, including the existence of two semi-independent brains within each human skull; the reality of black holes; continental drift and collisions; chimpanzee language, massive climatic changes on Mars and Venus; the antiquity of the human species; the search for extraterrestrial life; the elegant self-copying molecular architecture that controls our heredity and evolution; and observational evidence on the origin, nature, and fate of the universe as a whole.

But the success of science, both its intellectual excitement and its practical application, depends upon the self-correcting character of science. There must be a way of testing any valid idea. It must be possible to reproduce any valid experiment. The character or beliefs of the scientists are irrelevant; all that matters is whether the evidence supports his contention. Arguments from authority simply do not count; too many authorities have been mistaken too often. I would like to see these very effective scientific modes of thought communicated by the schools and the media; and it would certainly be an astonishment and delight to see them introduced into politics. Scientists have been known to change their minds completely and publicly when presented with new evidence or new arguments. I cannot recall the last time a politician displayed a similar openness and willingness to change.

Many of the belief systems at the edge or fringe of science are not subject to crisp experimentation. They are anecdotal, depending entirely on the validity of eyewitnesses, who in general are notoriously unreliable. On the basis of past performance most such fringe systems will turn out to be invalid. But we cannot reject out of hand, any more than we can accept at face value, all such contentions. For example, the idea that large rocks can drop from the skies was considered absurd by eighteenth-century scientists; Thomas Jefferson remarked about one such account that he would rather believe that two Yankee scientists lied than that stones fell from the heavens. Nevertheless, stones do fall from the heavens. They are called meteorites, and our preconceptions have no bearing on the truth of the matter. But the truth was established only by a careful analysis of dozens of independent witnesses to a common meteorite fall, supported by a great body of physical evidence, including meteorites recovered from the eaves of houses and the furrows of plowed fields.

Prejudice means literally pre-judgment, the rejection of a contention out of hand, before examining the evidence. If we wish to find out the truth of the matter we must approach the question with as open a mind as we can, and with a deep awareness of our own limitations and predispositions. On the other hand, if after carefully and openly examining the evidence, we reject the proposition, that is not prejudice. It might be called “post-judice.” It is certainly a prerequisite for knowledge.

Critical and skeptical examination is the method used in everyday practical matters as well as in science. When buying a new or used car, we think it prudent to insist on written warranties, test drives, and checks of particular parts. We are very careful about car dealers who are evasive on these points. Yet the practitioners of many borderline beliefs are offended when subjected to similarly close scrutiny. Many who claim to have extrasensory perception also claim that their abilities decline when they are carefully watched. The magician Uri Geller is happy to warp keys and cutlery in the vicinity of scientists—who, in their confrontations with nature, are used to an adversary who fights fair—but is greatly affronted at the idea of performances before an audience of skeptical magicians—who, understanding human limitations, are themselves able to perform similar effects by sleight of hand. Where skeptical observation and discussion are suppressed, the truth is hidden. The proponents of such borderline beliefs, when criticized, often point to geniuses of the past who were ridiculed. But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

The best antidote for pseudoscience, I firmly believe, is science:

• There is an African fresh-water fish that is blind. It generates a standing electric field, through perturbations in which it distinguishes between predators and prey and communicates in a fairly elaborate electrical language with potential mates and other fish of the same species. This involves an entire organ system and sensory capability completely unknown to pretechnological human beings.
• There is a kind of arithmetic, perfectly reasonable and self-contained, in which two times one does not equal one times two.
• Pigeons—one of the least prepossessing animals on Earth—are now found to have a remarkable sensitivity to magnetic-field strengths as small as one hundred thousandth that of the Earth's magnetic dipole. Pigeons evidently use this sensory capability for navigation and sense their surroundings by their magnetic signatures: metal gutters, electrical power lines, fire escapes and the like—a sensory modality glimpsed by no human being who ever lived.
• Quasars seem to be explosions of almost unimaginable violence in the hearts of galaxies which destroy millions of worlds, many of them perhaps inhabited.
• In an East African volcanic-ash flow 3.5 million years old there are footprints—of a being about four feet high with a purposeful stride that may be the common ancestor of apes and men. Nearby are the prints of a knuckle-walking primate corresponding to no animal yet discovered.
• Each of our cells contains dozens of tiny factories called mitochondria which combine our food with molecular oxygen in order to extract energy in convenient form. Recent evidence suggests that billions of years ago the mitochondria were free organisms which have slowly evolved into a mutually dependent relation with the cell. When many-celled organisms arose, the arrangement was retained. In a very real sense, then, we are not a single organism, but an array of about ten trillion beings and not all of the same kind.
• Mars has a volcano almost 80,000 feet high which was constructed about a billion years ago. An even larger volcano may exist on Venus.
• Radio telescopes have detected the cosmic black-body background radiation, the distant echo of the event called the Big Bang. The fires of creation are being observed today.

I could continue such a list almost indefinitely. I believe that even a smattering of such findings in modern science and mathematics is far more compelling and exciting than most of the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as “night-walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.” But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer universe, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder. And it has the additional and important virtue—to whatever extent the word has any meaning—of being true.

Copyright ©1979 by Carl Sagan. Excerpted from Broca's Brain, by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.