1998. Ballantine Books
Carl Sagan died before he could finish this book.
The Afterword is written by his surviving wife, who finished proofreading it. He didn't live long enough to finish the Acknowledgement, and one of the last things he was able to do was finish the prologue.
Carl Sagan. What a dude.
Billions and Billions was not necessarily what I thought it would be. Though, honestly, I didn't do any research before jumping into it.
I was surprised (although I'm not sure why) to see the clarity with which the great doctor was able to convey his ideas. If nothing else, Sagan was a great teacher. A sage, one might say. The Sagacious Sagan.
Billions and Billions deals, as one might expect from the subtitle, with considerations of life and death at a point in time just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world was very much in fear of total nuclear annihilation just a few years before, and Carl Sagan, an outspoken voice against nuclear proliferation, brings not only concern for mutually assured destruction to the table, but also global warming and the destruction of the environment.
The pleas against animal testing, which were thinly veiled in Dragons of Eden, are almost absent in B&B. But that's not necessarily what the book was supposed to be about.
It's unfortunate that so many of the concerns voiced in Billions and Billions, which are still valid concerns, are not higher priority items today. There still exist a great many social, environmental and political problems which have been forgotten in the Palin-plagued media crapfest which is the American dialogue.
I'll not quote too many passages, as the book does best on its own. It speaks for itself. Sagan, no advocate of religion and the notion of an afterlife, still lives on through his work.
It's a very touching plea for common sense.
"Along with progress in literacy such trends are the allies of Jeffersonian democracy. On the other hand, what passes for literacy in America in the late twentieth century is a very rudimentary knowledge of the English language, and television in particular tends to seduce the mass population away from reading. In pursuit of the profit motive, it has dumbed itself down to lowest-common-denominator programming-- instead of rising up to teach and inspire"
A man after my own heart, that Carl.
"Perhaps the most wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our most cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors has been replaced by a cold, immense, indifferent Universe in which humans are relegated to obscurity. "
Yes! It's true. Taking this into consideration, we can see the obvious selfishness associated with modern findamentalism and superstition. The unwillingness to realize that we are, in the grand scheme of things, individuals without a central importance in the universe, is difficult for us to accept. Thinking of one's self as not being the center of the Universe doesn't exactly have evolutionary advantages.
But, to think that we are special; that we have a special place, are some sort of a plan or prospectus makes us feel better. Especially when we don't enjoy our lives.
So, while we may feel less comforted knowing that we are on a mote of dust in the endless, cold sea of space, we should all the more appreciate the life we do have, and the ones we do love.
And banjos.
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