Cosmos (book)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the TV series, see Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
Cosmos (1980), published by Random House, is the name of a book by Carl Sagan based on his TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. It is similarly structured to the TV series and contains most of the information from the series (though the book often explores the information more deeply), and some information not found in it. The book is still in print as of 2006, and is the best-selling science book ever published in the English language. The sequel to Cosmos is Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994).
Cosmos was first and foremost intended to help the public better understand astronomy and astrophysics. Although the focus of the book is on astronomy and the world outside of the earth, it is also about human perception of the Cosmos throughout history. It is a history of how our matter originated in the stars, how consciousness sprang from that dead matter, and how unique our planet is. Sagan states on p. 12,
“Human beings, born ultimately of the stars and now for a while inhabiting a world called Earth, have begun their long voyage home.”
This statement could serve as a thesis for the rest of the book. At its most basic level, it is a book about the human history of science and achievement in relation to astronomy, which is segued into the quest to understand nature so that one day humanity can become a part of the greater universe outside of Earth.
One of the finest attributes of Cosmos and of any scientific writing meant for the public is how the explanations are put into perspective. Even something as simple and common in the human condition as sex can be shown to have developed two billion years ago for a completely different reason than we may have thought in our everyday lives. The pages are filled with equally surprising and interesting interpretations of the world around us. For example, Sagan admits he can’t even begin to predict what an otherworldly being would look like because his perception of life is not only bound to a single speck in the universe but is bound to single strata of life, the mammals. In another bow to history, Sagan wonders about the evolution of ideas:
“What if the scientific tradition of the ancient Ionian Greeks had survived and flourished?...What if science and experimental method and the dignity of crafts and mechanical arts had been vigorously pursued 2,000 years before the Industrial Revolution?”
The question he is getting at is: what if the scientific way of thought was broadly accepted before the 21st century (or the Enlightenment)? What if the process of empirical observation to explanation was not flipped about?
His answer: we would already be on our way to survey the nearest star, Alpha Centauri! The explanations, perspective and analysis are on par with other popular science works by Isaac Asimov, Lewis Thomas (specifically Lives of a Cell), Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene and one of Sagan's other books, The Dragons of Eden).
The pictures and photographs in the book supplement the type of explanation-with-perspective writing. Almost every single page of the book has a brilliant color painting or photograph. Many of the photographs are of planets and other extraterrestrial objects as viewed from space, transcending the reader’s preconceptions about earth as the singular entity to which we must belong. These images are further juxtaposed with plants, animals and art from past civilizations to complete a holistic viewpoint.
Thus, as the book moves along, the reader is entrapped between what he thought previously to be three entirely different spheres of existence, the beginnings of life, humanity’s past, and the future frontier of newly discovered space. It is then that Sagan drives his point to the core. These three spheres are one. They are concentric. The substance of earth was once a star. Ancient humans created art to further understanding about the grand empyrean, and this is no different from man's physical pursuit to the moon, a small step in the name of interstellar travel. The point of life—and not human life, but life as the universal consciousness of earth propped up by biochemical reactions—is to reach higher and understand the Cosmos. After all, our matter originated from stars so it only fits that, “We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars”.
