The Ancient Alien Question Read Online Free PDF

definitive answers. He was thus instrumental in the creation of CSICOP (The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), a group of skeptics who can be seen as the modern-day Inquisition, and who battle what they call “pseudoscience,” whether that is ufology, the Ancient Alien Theory, astrology, or parapsychology. But in the end, Sagan became disillusioned with their methods, arguing that they were just as unscientific.
When NASA began to send missions to Venus and Mars, in an effort to map those planets, Sagan was there to make sure the missions would educate and inform the general public. He felt that those missions had to have cameras, which most scientists felt was unimportant. What could a camera possibly contribute to scientific research? they wondered. At first, Sagan’s proposal was not accepted, but soon enough a camera became a standard feature on missions, to show the general public on an accessible level what those alien planets looked like.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Sagan became a household name. The American television channel PBS created a 13-part series produced by Sagan, called Cosmos , which became the realization of his dream: bringing a scientific topic into the general household, via the medium most suited for that purpose—television. Sagan became the host of the series, and it was the perfect excuse for his scientific colleagues, who had always seen him as being on the edge of science, to proclaim they felt he was more of a celebrity than a scientist. They felt scientists had to live in labs and ivory towers, never leaving them to give an opinion on any show whatsoever. Science, they felt, had no requirement to be accessible to the general public.
In 1986, Sagan finished Contact . The book was largely autobiographical, mapping a scientist’s quest to find extraterrestrial life. From the early 1990s onwards, Sagan knew that his life might not be long-lasting. He suffered from an illness that only bone-marrow transplants would heal. It created in him a senseof urgency, and also gave his work a more religious framework. The opposition between religion, the irrational side of humankind, and science, the rational opposite, was found everywhere, from the pages of The Demon Haunted World to the screens on which Contact would posthumously be projected.
Selling the movie itself was a difficult exercise, as its subject was science—never as popular as science fiction in Hollywood. The movie strove to convince the public of the importance of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but it starred a single female as the main character. She was furthermore without children, and an atheist—three characteristics that did not sit well in America, and Hollywood therefore had to be more forcefully persuaded that the project had a chance of box office success. Eleven years later, on July 11, 1997, the movie Contact was shown in American theaters; the following month I would see it in Orlando. Seven months earlier, Carl Sagan had died in Seattle, following a lung infection. He himself had made an interdimensional voyage, but unlike the scientist of Contact , he would not return to tell the tale.
    Message in a Bottle
Sagan was responsible for three attempts to notify the universe of our existence: In 1972–3, the Pioneer spacecraft was equipped with plaques of his design, detailing a diagram of a hydrogen atom; a pulsar map with the sun at the center, showing the relative distances of 14 pulsars and the binary code of their periods; figures of a nude man and woman set in front of a to-scale silhouette of Pioneer ; and a sketch of our solar system. Then, in 1974, Sagan, together with Frank Drake, created the so-called Arecibo Message, in which a message was beamed into space, aimed at the M13 star cluster. The message consisted of 1,679 binary digits that, when collected, formed an image of our little blue planet. The message incorporated the numbers 1through 10, as well as the atomic numbers of the elements