Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan

a Human Enterprise
III. The Historical Interest

    I n the long view, the greatest significance of space exploration is that it will irreversibly alter history. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the group with which Man identifies has gradually broadened during this history of mankind. Today the bulk of the world’s population has at least a major personal identification with national superstates. While progress has not been smooth, and there are occasional reversals, the trend is clearly toward a group identification with mankind as a whole. Space exploration can hasten this identification. Astronauts and cosmonauts have remarked with great feeling about the beauty and serenity of the Earth viewed from space. For many of them, a flight into space has been a religious experience, transfiguring their lives. National boundaries do not appear in photographs of Earth from space. As Arthur C. Clarke somewhere remarked, it is difficult to imagine even the most fervent of nationalists not reconsidering his views as he sees the Earth fade from a faint crescent to a tiny point of light, lost among millions of stars.
    Space exploration provides a calibration of the significance of our tiny planet, lost in a vast and unknown universe. The search for life elsewhere will almost surely drive home the uniqueness of Man: The winding, unsure, improbable, evolutionary pathway that has brought us to where we are; and the improbability of finding–even in a universe populated with other intelligences–one with a form very much like our own. In this perspective, the similarities among men will stand out overwhelmingly against our differences.
    There is a practical geocentrism to our everyday life. We still talk about the Sun rising and setting rather than the Earth turning. We still think of the universe organized for our benefit and populated only by us. Space exploration will bring also a little humility.
    Harold Urey has perceptively referred to the space program as a kind of contemporary pyramid-building. Seen in the context of Pharaonic Egypt, the analogy seems particularly apt, for the pyramids were an attempt to deal with problems of cosmology and immortality. In the long historical perspective, this is precisely what the space program is about. The footprints left by astronauts on the Moon will survive a million years, and the miscellaneous instruments and packing cases left there may last as long as the Sun.
    On the other hand, the pyramids are monumental and, we today believe, futile efforts to insure the survival after death of one man, the Pharaoh. Perhaps a better analogy is with the ziggurats, the terraced towers of the Sumerians and Babylonians–the places where the gods came down to Earth and the population as a whole transcended everyday life. There is no doubt a little of the pyramid in the great rocket boosters; but I think their ultimate significance is more likely to be as contemporary ziggurats.
    A society engaged in a relatively modest, peaceful, and intellectually significant exploration of its surroundings garners thereby the possibility of achieving greatness. It is difficult to prove such causal chains, and, historically, there are no one-to-one correlations. But it is remarkable that the nations and epochs marked by the greatest flowering of exploration are also marked by the greatest cultural exuberance. In part, this must be because of the contact with new things, new ways of life, and new modes of thought unknown to a closed culture, with its vast energies turned inward.
    There are examples from the Biblical Near East, from Periclean Athens, and from other times, but I am most taken by the example of the age of European exploration and discovery. The vernacular languages of France, England, and Iberia found a definitive literary expression at the same time that the earliest transatlantic voyages of discovery were occurring. Rabelais and Montaigne in France; Shakespeare, Milton, and the translators of the King James