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The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years o… - Carl Sagan
" "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.
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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.
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Also Known As
Native Name:
Carl Edward Sagan
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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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One consequence of this train of argument is that, even if civilizations commonly arise on planets throughout the Galaxy, few of them will be both long-lived and nontechnological. Since hazards from asteroids and comets must apply to inhabited planets all over the Galaxy, if there are such, intelligent beings everywhere will have to unify their home worlds politically, leave their planets, and move small nearby worlds around. Their eventual choice, as ours, is spaceflight or extinction.
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But the universe, all of it, almost everywhere, is 99 percent hydrogen and helium,* the two simplest elements. Helium, in fact, was detected on the Sun before it was found on the Earth — hence its name (from Helios, one of the Greek sun gods). Might the other chemical elements have somehow evolved from hydrogen and helium? To balance the electrical repulsion, pieces of nuclear matter would have to be brought very close together so that the short-range nuclear forces are engaged. This can happen only at very high temperatures where the particles are moving so fast that the repulsive force does not have time to act — temperatures of tens of millions of degrees. In nature, such high temperatures and attendant high pressures are common only in the insides of the stars.
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