The Cosmic Connection: Carl Sagan’s Extraterrestrial Perspective on Life, the Universe and Our Place in It
How does life work, and how did it begin? How was the universe created? Could life develop beyond our planet? What is a black hole, and what might its existence mean? What are the main scientific theories that explain our cosmos? In The Cosmic Connection, Carl Sagan sets out to answer these questions for everyone.
Author: Carl Sagan (1934–1996)
Title: The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (1973)
Format: English hardcover (Cambridge University Press, 2000 edition, produced by Jerome Agel), 334 pages
Scope: Popular astronomy and science
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0521783038 (ASIN 0521783038)
A Universal Language
Natural laws govern the workings of our whole world, and mathematics is a universal language. Sagan describes his view of the world and explains many scientific advances in fields such as astronomy, physics and chemistry. It is an enjoyable book for any astronomy enthusiast, and a record of how far the field had come.
Why Us?
Understanding the world around us makes us aware of our own existence, and makes us ask why we were the species that evolved and developed intelligence. Are there civilisations more advanced than ours? Are we like a colony of ants, living unaware of what surrounds it and knowing nothing of the existence of other beings?
A Message on Pioneer
One of the book’s most fascinating chapters tells the story of the plaque attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the first human-made objects designed to leave the solar system. Sagan and the astronomer Frank Drake designed the message, a drawing of a man and a woman, a diagram of the solar system and a map locating the Sun among nearby pulsars, with artwork by Linda Salzman Sagan. Sagan explains the thinking behind every element, and the controversies it caused, from the scientific to the moral.
Life Beyond Earth
Sagan was one of the pioneers of exobiology, the scientific study of the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, and he worked on several NASA missions to the planets. The book discusses Mars, Venus and the outer planets as possible homes for life, the chemistry that might have given rise to it on the early Earth, and the search for radio signals from other civilisations, a field in which Sagan was an enthusiastic advocate.
Carl Sagan
Sagan (1934–1996) was an American astronomer at Cornell University and one of the most famous science communicators of the twentieth century. His television series Cosmos (1980), and the book that accompanied it, reached hundreds of millions of people, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Dragons of Eden. He later helped create the Voyager Golden Record and inspired the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photograph of Earth.
How It Has Aged
Some of the scientific details have been overtaken by later discoveries, as the essays in the Cambridge edition point out. But Sagan’s sense of wonder, and his conviction that understanding the cosmos changes how we see ourselves, have not dated at all.
Who Will Enjoy It
Readers who loved Cosmos will find here many of the ideas that later went into the series, expressed in short, lively chapters that can be read independently. It is also an ideal introduction to Sagan for younger readers interested in astronomy and space exploration, and a reminder of the excitement of the early 1970s, when spacecraft were revealing the planets for the first time and the search for life beyond Earth was becoming a real science.
Why Read It
Written before Cosmos, this is Sagan in his early, exuberant voice, and it helped make him famous. The Cambridge edition adds essays by Freeman Dyson, David Morrison and Ann Druyan looking back on the book’s ideas.
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