Or consider the mainstream religions. We are enjoined in Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to commit murder; in Leviticus… - Carl Sagan

"Galileo, Kopernik için helyosantrik (Dünya'nın Güneş'in çevresinde döndüğü gerçeği) varsayımının "onaylayıcısı ve canlandırıcısı" deyimini kullanır. Yoksa onu bu keşfin sahibi kılmaz. Aristarkhos'un dönemiyle Kopernik'in dönemi arasında geçen 1800 yıl boyunca gezegenlerin doğru olarak dizilişini bilen çıkmadı. Oysa MÖ 280 yılında doğru olarak açıklanmıştı. Aristarkhos'un ortaya attığı fikir, çağdaşlarını çileden çıkardı. Anaksagoras'a, Bruno'ya ve Galileo'ya karşı yükselen seslerin benzerleri Aristarkhos'a karşı da yükseldi ve dinsizlikle suçlanması istendi. Aristarkhos ve Kopernik'e karşı gösterilen direniş, Güneş'in yerküre çevresinde dödüğü görüşü günlük yaşamımızda halen de sürmektedir. Hâlâ Güneş'in "doğduğundan" Güneş'in "battığından" söz ederiz. Aristarkhos'un helyosantrizm fikrini ortaya attığından bu yana 2200 yıl geçti ve kullandığımız dil hâlâ yerküremizin dönmediği yolundadır."

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system — and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found — if there's anyone out there to do the finding.
We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us — independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.
But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we — otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space — perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things?
Or perhaps the records wil

Sakharov in the Cold War year 1968 boldly wrote — in a book published in the West and widely distributed in samizdat in the USSR — “Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships