The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective

Carl Sagan – 1973

One of Carl Sagan’s first books, The Cosmic Connection was clearly designed to appeal to the New Age generation, to lure them in with familiarly spacey language but then to attempt talking sense into them.  I don’t know if the strategy worked or not, as most of the intended audience tended to remain in the Chariots of the Gods? (1968) mentality and were not much interested in embracing science.  Sagan is his typical emphatic and eloquent self in this book, but he would hone his voice in later works, starting with The Dragons of Eden (1977), and reach his apex, of course, with the Cosmos (1980) TV program and accompanying book.  Sagan’s recurring theme through most of his work is that life and nature are far more vast, wondrous and inspiring than man-made systems like astrology and the occult could ever appreciate.  We do indeed long to feel connected to the universe in some spiritual way, but this is already a scientific reality – as the atoms that make us up are the same as those that make up Jupiter – and we don’t need fuzzy and superstitious theories to satisfy this human need.  Personally, I feel that Sagan articulated this better in some of his later books and speeches; (“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” he said in Cosmos).  The Cosmic Connection is burdened slightly by its organization, which is fragmented in the same way that a lot of non-fiction books of the time were.  This is a book with a “produced by” credit as well as an author’s credit.  Marshall McLuhan might have started this trend with some of his books in the late 60s that were similarly intended to – to put it bluntly – dumb down his ideas for a wider audience.  The effect is supposed to be an adaptation to mass media culture, with heavy emphasis on jumpy uses of text and a preponderance of illustrations from diverse sources.  I find the style a little distracting and unnecessary, and it’s worthwhile to note that Sagan abandoned it in the 70s, (along with pretty much everyone else in the publishing world).  The pieces in the book, though divided into sections, still feel a little slapdash.  There are brief reminiscences, for example, about encounters with the CIA andwith dolphin trainers.  But the strongest material comes towards the end, when he gets into what really concerns him; #1, debunking belief in astrology and UFO sightings, and #2, encouraging a view of science as a source of spirituality, not just a cold apparatus that manufactures medicines and machines.  Sagan is one of my true heroes and I have nothing but respect for him, but when he waxes poetic about how we’re all “made of star stuff,” I imagine conventional scientists rolling their eyes and hippies nodding solemnly until they realize that he doesn’t necessarily believe what they believe at all.