Spaced Out

By John Wilhelm

THE COSMIC CONNECTION An Extraterrestrial Perspective by CARL SAGAN 288 pages. Anchor Press. $7.95.

COMMUNICATION WITH EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE (CETI) Edited by CARL SAGAN 428 pages. The MIT Press. $10.

Questioned recently about what he thought any strange creature who stepped out of a flying saucer might look like, a celebrated astronomer quipped: "A miniature Carl Sagan." It was not a bad guess. Exobiologist Sagan has long been the prime advocate and perennial gadfly for planetary exploration. He is also this country's leading believer in the possibility of communicating with civilizations on other worlds. With Soviet Astronomer I.S. Shklovskii, Sagan wrote Intelligent Life in the Universe, a recent book that presents the classic argument for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. As the current director of planetary studies at Cornell, Sagan happily creates scientific scenarios in terms of possibility, rather than strict probability. (The late Gerard Kuiper [TIME, Jan. 7], for years director of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, once remarked: "Carl doesn't want to be confused by the facts.")

To Sagan, it is scientifically possible for Mars to harbor "macro-organisms" the size of polar bears, who crunch rocks for water, sport silicon skins to protect themselves against deadly sunburn, and hibernate for thousands of years at a stretch. Sagan also contemplates astro-engineered civilizations so far advanced that their accomplishments would seem to us "indistinguishable from magic." He can easily imagine intergalactic, rapid-transit routes where "an object that plunges down a rotating black hole may re-emerge elsewhere and elsewhen--in another place and another time."

I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the earth --and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a mile across that rotate thirty times a second. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size of and composition of bacteria ... The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.

This is Sagan's space litany, presented in The Cosmic Connection. Readers who would like more detail could do worse than begin with the 39 mini-essays in the book. Sagan's purpose is nothing less than to refocus man's perspective about his place in the chain of being. Astronauts' bootprints left on the moon stir his imagination like "contemporary ziggurats," places "where the gods came down to earth and the population as a whole transcended everyday life." For him, the U.S. space program is justified simply because it irreversibly thrust us into interplanetary travel. "In all the history of mankind," Sagan writes, "there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration."

Sagan's enthusiasms are widely accepted in the U.S., even by people who have never heard of him. California beach blonds zip the freeways, sporting bumper stickers like: FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL. The Gallup poll reports that 51% of the American people believe in UFOS. Even the fusty National Academy of Sciences was led recently to admit that contact with other civilizations "is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us."

The growing presumption about life on other worlds led, in 1971, to a multidisciplinary conference in Soviet Armenia on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Sagan, predictably, headed the American delegation. The resulting conference report just published by M.I.T. deals with attempts to peg the possible number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy at or beyond our own technological level.

The resulting book, though generally understandable to the interested layman, sometimes dips into technical specialties. But everybody should be interested in its basic message. Conferees from six nations concluded that there are about 1,000,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone. The nearest probable one is only a few hundred light-years away. As Sagan puts it: "The idea of extraterrestrial life is an idea whose time has come."

John Wilhelm

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.