And if we are ignorant of what the issues are and can't even ask the critical questions, then we're not going to make much of a difference. If we can understand the issues, if we can pose the right questions, if we can point out the contradictions, then we can make some progress. There are many other things that can be done, but it seems to me that those two, the baloney-detection kit and use of the democratic process where available, are at least the first two things to consider.
Questioner: [inaudible]
CS: Right. You say everyone in this room has felt aggression. Surely that's right. I'm sure it's right. There may be a few saints in the room… and I very much hope that there are. But at least almost everyone in the room must have felt it. But I also maintain that everyone in the room has felt compassion. Everyone in the room has felt love. Everyone in the room has felt kindness. And so we have two warring principles in the human heart, both of which must have evolved by natural selection, and it's not hard to understand the selective advantage of both of them. And so the issue has to do with which is in the preponderance. And here it is the use of our intellect that is central. Because we're talking about adjudicating between conflicting emotions. And you can't have an adjudication between emotions by an emotion. It must be done by our perceptive intellectual ability. And this is the place where Einstein said something very perceptive. In response-this is post-nuclear war, post-1945-in response to precisely the question you have just formulated, in which Einstein was saying that we must give the dominance to our compassionate side, he said, "What is the alternative?" That is, if we do not, if we cannot manage it, it is clear that we are gone. We're doomed. And therefore we have no alternative. Certainly untrammeled, continuing aggression in an age of nuclear weapons is a prescription for disaster. So either get rid of the nuclear weapons or change what passes for social relations among humans.
But even getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether will not solve this problem. There will be new technical advances. And already there are chemical and biological weapons that could perhaps rival some of the effects of nuclear war. So this is a very key aspect of what I was thinking when I said we are at a branch point in our history, in the sense of who we are. I maintain it's not a question of sudden change, that we have been compassionate for a million years, and it's a question of which part of the human psyche the governments-and the media, and the churches, and the schools-give precedence to. Which one do they teach?
Which one do they encourage? And all I'm saying is that it is within our capability to survive. I don't guarantee it. Prophecy is a lost art. And I don't know what the probabilities are that we will go one way or another. And no one says it's easy. But it is clear, as Einstein said, that if we do not make a change in our way of thinking, all is lost.
Acknowledgments
Editing these lectures afforded me, for precious moments at a time, the happy delusion that I was working with Carl once again. The words he spoke in these lectures would sound in my head and it felt wonderfully as if we had somehow been transported back to the two heavenly decades when we thought and wrote together.
We had the pleasure of writing several of our projects, the Cosmos television series among them, with the astronomer Steven Soter, our dear friend. Since Carl's death Steve and I wrote the first two planetarium shows for the magnificent Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Once I had turned Carl's Gifford Lectures into a book, I invited Steve to join me in editing the final drafts. We felt sure that Carl would not have wanted us to use the 1985 slides from the lectures. Astronomers have seen farther and more clearly since then. Steve found the gorgeous images that replace them. He also wrote the scientific updates that appear in the footnotes. I am grateful to him for his many editorial contributions to this book.
Ann Godoff has been our editor ever since Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl's favorite among all the books he and we ever wrote. She also edited Carl's Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World, and Billions & Billions. It was her recognition that the Gifford Lectures should become a book that made The Varieties of Scientific Experience possible. Her imagination and wit made the process of that transformation a pleasure. I thank her colleagues at the Penguin Press, art director Claire Vaccaro, and Ann's assistant Liza Darnton for all they did for the book and for me. I am grateful to Maureen Sugden for her meticulous and thoughtful copyediting.
Jonathan Cott has always been a North Star to me, guiding me to every possible kind of great cultural experience. I am further indebted to him for the valuable editorial comments and suggestions he gave me for this book.
I thank Sloan Harris of ICM, for his excellent representation and his consistent commitment to my work, and Katharine Cluverius, in his office, for her kind assistance.
Kristin Albro and Pam Abbey in my office at Cosmos Studios have provided valuable administrative support, and Janet Rice helped in a host of ways, making it possible for me to focus on this work.
I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and loving kindness of Harry Druyan, Cari Sagan Greene, Les Druyan and Viky Rojas-Druyan, Nick and Clinnette Minnis Sagan, Sasha Sagan, Sam Sagan, Kathy Crane-Trentalancia, and Nancy Palmer.
Carl's Gifford Lectures were expertly transcribed from audiotapes long ago by Shirley Arden, his executive assistant at the time. As I read the transcripts, which were done without the text-processing magic of today's computer technology I felt a renewed sense of respect for her consistently meticulous work.
I would also like to thank the organizers of the Gifford Lectures and the University of Glasgow for their kind invitation to Carl and their hospitality to us during our time in Scotland.
In the ten years since Carl's death, these lectures sat in one of the thousand drawers of his vast archives. For some reason the Gifford Lectures were never logged into the archives' otherwise reliably comprehensive index. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic of extreme fundamentalist violence and during a time in the United States when phony piety in public life reached a new low and the critical separation of church and state and public classroom were dangerously eroded, I felt that Carl's perspective on these questions was needed more than ever. I searched in vain for the transcripts. Our friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, succeeded where I had failed. My gratitude to him for this, and much else, is profound.
• Ann Druyan Ithaca, New York March 21, 2006
Figure Captions
Jacket
A 2004 image of Comet NEAT made by the Gunma Observatory of Japan. Every little red/green/blue dash is the spectral trace of a star.
Frontispiece: Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
In 2004 the Hubble Space Telescope looked at a small piece of sky (a tenth the size of the full Moon) for eleven days to make this image of nearly ten thousand galaxies. Light from the most distant galaxies took almost thirteen billion years to travel the distance to Hubble's lens. Each galaxy contains many billions of stars, each star a potential sun to perhaps a dozen worlds.