Happy Carl Sagan Day!!!

Always loved this tribute by Symphony of Science to one of the great ambassadors of science in my lifetime. Thanks Carl for helping ignite that spark of cosmic curiosity in me. You will always be an inspiration and hero to me...

Carl Sagan 11/9/34 - 12/20/96

www.carlsagan.com

Cosmos Episodes streamed on Hulu

Symphony of Science

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[Carl Sagan]

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch

You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes

You might emerge somewhere else in space

Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us

If we do not destroy ourselves

We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits

Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise

A morning filled with 400 billion suns

The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths

Of exquisite interrelationships

Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully

On how well we understand this cosmos

In which we float like a mote of dust

In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect

It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes

it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one

Has an elaborate logical underpinning

The brain has its own language

For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]

For thousands of years

People have wondered about the universe

Did it stretch out forever

Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes

From dark matter to a possible big crunch

Our image of the universe today

Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]

How lucky we are to live in this time

The first moment in human history

When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean

Recently we’ve waded a little way out

And the water seems inviting

Stephen Hawking: There is No Heaven

Stephen Hawking: 'There is No Heaven; It's a Fairy Story'

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Heaven is a man-made idea. Not only is it man-made, but the people who thought it up were so primitive in their understanding of the the human body and mind, of the earth and universe, of the forces of nature that they needed to assign man-like attributes to their world to make sense of it all. This is why we've had sun gods, and sea gods, gods of wind and gods of thunder. After an all-out arms race of of deistic proportions we are now left with all-powerful, all-knowing, omniscient, universal beings (who happen to look like us and get jealous and angry like us) Ancient peoples did not understand death. Even today, it is hard to grasp knowing someone so well and then one day they just aren't there anymore. It is a very pacifying feeling to think about someone moving on to a place of pure beauty and splendor after they die. The truth is, there is no way anyone can ever know this until they die. These vivid descriptions you read about the afterlife are just people willfully imagining what they hope it might be like to make them less fearful of dying. I am actually not as bothered by the human concept of heaven. If that makes you feel better in your life, then by all means believe it. I guess my real beef on this topic comes from the church when they say "believe like I do and keep my sacraments and pray to my deity only or you will go straight to hell in a hand basket when you die". Supernatural threats that prey upon our basic human fears of death and mortality are the most powerful and the most vile of all.

I say instead of throwing your hat in the ring blindly, let's continue to research what we call the human "conscience" or the human "soul". Try to understand the brain on a fundamental level as we take our last breaths. Are the "near-death experiences" just your brain synapses misfiring as it loses oxygen or is there something more subtle actually happening? This is where we should spend our time. In the laboratory. Not in the pew. No one knows what happens when you die. If someone says they know based on an ancient  book, they are full of it.