Carl Sagan , livre ebook

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
A Life
Keay Davidson

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
New York Chichester Weinheim Brisbane Singapore Toronto
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 1999 by Keay Davidson. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc. Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davidson, Keay.
Carl Sagan : a life / Keay Davidson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-25286-7 (alk. paper)
1. Sagan, Carl, 1934-1996. 2. Astronomers-United States
Biography. I. Sagan, Carl, 1934-1996. II. Title.
QB36.S15D38 1999
520 .92-dc21
[B]
99-36206
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to the memory of space scientist James B. Pollack (1938-1994) and to the work of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals Inc. (NOGLSTP) in Pasadena, California.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing predispositions. Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion.
-Lawrence Durrell
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Brooklyn
2 Chicago
3 The Dungeon
4 High Ground
5 California
6 Harvard
7 Mars and Manna
8 Mr. X
9 Gods Like Men
10 The Shadow Line
11 The Dragons of Eden
12 Annie
13 Cosmos
14 Contact
15 The Value of L
16 Look Back, Look Back
17 Hollywood
18 The Night Freight
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations follow page 282
Preface
One autumn evening in 1969, when I was sixteen, I skipped my homework and instead sprawled on my bed, reading a wondrous book published a few years earlier: Intelligent Life in the Universe. The authors were two astronomers, a Russian named I. S. Shklovskii and an American, Carl Sagan. This book changed my life. I suspect that if I hadn t read it, I would not have spent much of the past three decades thinking, reading, and writing about many of the things about which I think, read, and write. Early in the book appears a black-and-white photo of a cloud of stars, somewhere near the center of our galaxy. There are approximately a million stars in this photograph, the caption states. According to the estimates of Chapter 29, a planet of one of these stars holds a technical civilization vastly in advance of our own. I stared at that photograph, entranced, for a long time.
By the late 1960s I had ceased to believe in God. Without God, the cosmos seemed drabber-just molecules and plasma-and quite pointless. But a new, more enchanting cosmos was offered by Sagan and Shklovskii. In their conception, the galaxies were like mammoth Petri dishes, brimming with life. On millions of worlds, microbes had probably evolved into intelligent beings. Perhaps these beings were curious about the rest of the cosmos and were seeking other beings by transmitting radio signals in all directions. Perhaps their centuries of accumulated learning, encoded in invisible electromagnetic waves, were passing through my bedroom at that very moment. Sagan and Shklovskii defended this view on grounds that seemed perfectly rational and perfectly scientific, and that remain so today.
However, people can believe in rational things for irrational reasons. Indeed, as historians of science increasingly acknowledge, the history of science makes more sense if one takes into account the occasional importance of non-rational factors (social prejudices, political tendencies, religious influences, and so on). In retrospect, I realize that as a youth, I accepted the notion of alien life for a fundamentally psychological reason, namely to fill a spiritual void within. I wanted to believe in aliens, so I did, and I tacked on the scientific rationales (which are perfectly valid in their own right) after the fact.
And-truth be told-Sagan, the great rationalist, did the same thing. He admitted as much in his 1985 novel, Contact , through the introspections of his alter ego, the fictional radioastronomer Ellie Arroway. This contradicts the accusations of those (especially on the political right) who accused him of being scientistic and hyper-logical. On the contrary, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Dragons of Eden (1977), Sagan affirmed the value of both rational and irrational ( intuitive, some prefer to call them) insights; they walk hand in hand down the great road to Truth.
Sagan and Shklovskii s book was enthralling for terrestrial reasons as well. It was published in 1966, not too many years after the United States and the Soviet Union had almost blown each other to smithereens over Cuba. To a generation of schoolchildren raised on cold war propaganda and trained in duck and cover exercises, the idea that Soviet and American scientists might coauthor a book (such collaborations are routine nowadays) seemed only slightly less fantastic than the notion that invisible alien messages were passing through my suburb. Shklovskii and Sagan s remarkable collaboration (as the Washington Post called it) presaged the other great activity of Sagan s life: helping to prevent our civilization from self-destructing. In time, he would become a feared foe of the military, the Reagan Administration, and the nuclear weapons establishment.
Sagan was different things to different people. To a generation of young Americans, his eloquence on television and the printed page was an irresistible summons to scientific careers. To his scientific colleagues, he was a sometimes stimulating, sometimes upsetting gadfly who proposed both brilliant and irresponsible ideas about the solar system. To NASA, he was its most valued-albeit unofficial and erratic-propagandist. To diehard cold warriors, he was a fuzzy-headed, left-leaning academic who meddled in the machinery of nuclear weapons policy. To some conservatives and cultural traditionalists, he was a suspicious symbol of atheism, secularism, and naively rationalistic scientism.
But to the general public-which tends to resent science for undermining religious faith and New Age folklore-he offered an alluring compensation for all that science has destroyed. That compensation was a vast and fascinating cosmos, wherein exotic beings chatter by radiotelescope and explore via starship. Critics had accused science of robbing the cosmos of old enchantments-gods, angels, astrological forces. But Sagan re-enchanted the stars in new, scientific-sounding ways purged of medieval irrationalisms (but invested with new, modern, alluring ones, such as the idea of benevolent aliens who would transmit instructions for solving terrestrial problems).
He was a hero of my childhood and youth. But a childhood hero is a dangerous thing to have, because one eventually outgrows childhood. One summer evening at a poolside party in Santa Cruz, I was seated next to the physicist-author Freeman Dyson. I asked him if he ever had a hero. Yes, he replied, and I was unfortunate enough to meet him. (Dyson s hero was the brilliant but cantankerous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane.) In that regard, when I began this project, the writer Timothy Ferris warned me that some biographers end up hating the subjects of their biographies. Indeed, I was worried about what I might learn about Sagan; like all professional science writers, I had heard some less than flattering stories about him. (Not all proved to be true.) His most serious flaws involved interpersonal relations. Three marriages-that tells you something. And consider this: he dedicated three of his books to intimates (The Dragons of Eden to Linda Salzman, Comet to Shirley Arden, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors to Lester Grinspoon); he eventually had falling-outs with them all, one by one. One of his oldest associates, the distinguished planetary scientist Tobias Owen, declined to discuss Sagan with me because he felt uncomfortable talking about what he called Sagan s Jekyll and Hyde character. Yet after scrutinizing Sagan s life in detail, I must say that I not only still like him but respect him more than ever; his personal foibles are not atypical of ambitious males, and are far outweighed by his virtues. Because he lived, the world is a better place.
As a scientist, Sagan speculated freely, sometimes wildly, and outraged his more cautious colleagues. A few regarded him as a charlatan. Even some of his closer mentors, notably Gerard Kuiper and Harold Urey, nursed serious doubts about his sense of scientific responsibility. Yet he helped to pioneer much of modern space science, particularly the subject of planetary atmospheres. He also raised a crop of graduate students, who now launch robotic explorers to the planets.
Sagan was also something of a prophet. He anticipated some interesting scientific discoveries, although sometimes (and oddly)