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Our global civilisation is clearly on the edge of failure and the most important task it faces, preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens a… - Carl Sagan
" "Our global civilisation is clearly on the edge of failure and the most important task it faces, preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet. But if we're willing to live with the growing likelihood of nuclear war shouldn't we also been willing to explore vigorously every possible means to prevent nuclear war. Shouldn't we consider in every nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental restructuring of economic political social and religious institutions. We've reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases, nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth. Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labelled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war were practical or as if there's only one human nature. But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them. In the last two centuries abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied them and some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.
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About Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect will change the earth's climate system.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Carl Edward Sagan
Alternative Names:
Sagan
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Carl E. Sagan
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Carl E Sagan
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C. E. Sagan
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C.E. Sagan
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C E Sagan
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C. Sagan
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C Sagan
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Sagan C
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Sagan C.
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Sagan C. E.
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Sagan CE
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Shorter versions of this quote
If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies? From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: to preserve the lives and well-being of the citizens of the planet. Should we not then be willing to explore vigorously, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental redesign of economic, political, social and religious institutions?
Faced with so disquieting an alternative, we are always tempted to minimize the seriousness of the problem, to argue that those who worry about doomsday’s are alarmists; to hold that fundamental changes in our institutions are impractical or contrary to ‘human nature’, as if nuclear war were practical, or as if there were only one human nature. Full-scale nuclear war has never happened. Somehow this is taken to imply that it never will. But we can experience it only once. But then it will be too late to reformulate the statistics.
Additional quotes by Carl Sagan
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good. All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.” That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War — when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there’s a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious.
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Another contemporary example is the “war” on drugs — where the government and munificently funded civic groups systematically distort and even invent scientific evidence of adverse effects (especially of marijuana), and in which no public official is permitted even to raise the topic for open discussion.
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