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[2, 2/20/93]
CONFIDENTIAL
Draft copy: Please do not quote or copy.
A PALE BLUE DOT

by Carl Sagan
C
Copyright °1993 by Carl Sagan

[3/16/93]
A Pale Blue Dot;
Assume approx. 15 pp. MS/chapter = approx. 10-12 pp.

print/chapter:
Length of 38 chapters yields 380-456 pp.
+ pix.
Length of 45 chapters yields 4 50-540 pp.
2 bks. of about 22 chapters each yield 220-264 pp. each
+ pix.
Prrs*«±- ^'1- rr r
[2A, 2/20/93]
* A Pale Blue Dot:
Tentative Table of Contents
Introduction
A Pale Blue Dot* The Earth fa-om Lhe FiünLlma ef the Colar
System-
A Universe Not Made for Us
■Space: Findmc^-Oat
Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?
Are We Being Visited? ~^~
I» •» '• It i f s
r- W?
Mr» Pmpiil
<=¡ma I | paptnrci
paptUre: Voyager
V( at Titan
A Micoicn to ari UiilCIiuwii Worfrch—Voyager at Uranus.
r
*»M <•
The Skies of Other Worlds
The Volcanos of Other Worlds
Waves
Explorers H- Coldon/Cagan dialogue,—lay I paragiaphi—

^PhaMriaimLaay SuiiuLy [Lwu iufc;ai'iiritji>j.
Mars ^Caoc foi Mam, To Mars Together, Back tó tné Frontier")
Why fionrl TTmnniTí tn Mire?] _
"1 í»c Se* re I

I
[4-3-93.atp]
Let's call the Introduction "Wanderers," and here is an

introductory paragraph:
We were wanderers from the beginning. We followed the herds
in their annual migrations. When there was a drought or an odd
long-term chill in the summer air, a premonition of an ice age,
we sought a better clime. When we couldn't get on with the other
members of our little band, we left to seek a more congenial
group elsewhere. For 99.9 percent of the tenure of humans on
Earth, we were hunter-gatherers and nomads. When the climate was
equable, we managed a good life. We were willing to stay put, to
become sedentary, careless, a little overweight perhaps. But no
circumstances last forever. And so, even after generations of
village or city life, the nomadic urge, the song of the open road
still sings within us. It has been, I think, put there by
natural selection, an essential element in our survival. You
never know what's going to happen. You cannot predict when your
life, or your band, or even your species might owe its survival
to a restless few, driven by an impulse they can hardly
articulate, craving, especially early in their lives, unknown
lands and undiscovered regions. Vast migrations of people have
occurred — some voluntary, most involuntary ~ that have shaped
the human condition. The planet is now all explored. To first
approximation, all the various ethnic groups have met each other
and interacted. We still flee from war and famine. As the
[4-3-93.atp]
climate changes, there will be vast numbers of environmental

refugees. Better conditions will always beckon, and people will
ebb and flow around the world. But the lure of new places,
unknown, undiscovered, holding untold opportunities, has faded.
The Earth is all explored. There seems to be nowhere else to go.
Except. . . Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not
yet. . . But other worlds beckon.
[Prior to next passage, * * *.]
[2B, 2/20/93]
Introduction
My grandfather was a beast of burdenj) and I have been to.

'Moptune i [Gort ofij-
Early in this century, Leib Gruber lived in a small town in
the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire in Central Europe. His father
sold fish when he could. But times were often hard. As a young
man, the only honest work available to Leib was carrying people
on his back across the river Bug. The customer, male or female,
would mount Leib; he would wade out in a shallow stretch of the
river and deliver his burden to the opposite bank. No bridges
had been built here, and the draft required of ferryboats was too
shallow. Horses or mules might have served the purpose, but they
had other uses. That left Leib and a few other young men like
him. They had no other uses. There was no other work available.
They hired themselves out like [camels or oxen]. They would
lounge about the river bank, calling out their prices and
praising their drayage virtues to likely customers among the
passersby.v
I don't think that in all his young manhood Leib had been
more than 100 kilometers from his hometown. But then, in
[year], he suddenly left — to avoid a murder rap, according to
one family legend — leaving his young wife behind. How
different the great German port cities must have seemed compared
to his tiny backwater hamlet, how vast the ocean, how strange the
fl983,_ foreword to The Planets] ^
pli
Un ViJiirr. Hinnmrnrnrl <"haf o\rory ppg r>f 1-hgffl 1g « Mf>r)d. Mot
-is closely similar tu Llie EaiLh.—We—have—f-eu»d__

\tiT.mnn_ (^f-^-vhhn-r pinna-he and înnnnr, -hhrinânrlQ nf asl-prniHc agj___
"Since the advent of successful interplanetary flight in

1962, we have flown by, orbited, or landed on more than forty new
worlds. We have discovered vast volcanic eminences that dwarf
the highest mountain on Earth; ancient river valleys on a planet
now too cold for running water; ice worlds that have
enigmatically melted; a cloud-covered planet with an atmosphere
of corrosive acids and a surface temperature above the melting
point of lead; uneroded surfaces preserving some of the history
of the formation of the solar system over four billion years ago;
exquisitely patterned ring systems, revealing the subtle
harmonies of gravity; and a world surrounded by an impenetrable
cloud of complex organic molecules like those that in the
earliest history of our planet led to the origin of life.
We have uncovered wonders undreamed of by our ancestors who
speculated on the nature of those wandering points of light in
the night sky. We have begun to probe the mysteries of the
origins of our planet and ourselves. By examining other worlds,
by discovering what else is possible, by coming face to face with
the alternative fates of worlds more or less like ours, we are
beginning to understand better our own world. .-The unmanned —
explumtion of the solai bybLeiu initialed by Llit» UJilLed Sbtttes
{Introduction (2B, 2/20/93)] 2
lofty skyscrapers and endless hubbub of his new land. We know

nothing of his crossing, but have found the record of the voyage
made a few years later by his wife Chaiya — finally rejoining
Leib after he had saved up enough money for her passage. She
traveled in the cheapest class on the Batavia. a passenger ship
of Hamburg registry. The ship's records indicate that Chaiya
could not read or write, knew not a word of English, and had one
dollar to her name. She landed, lived in America just long
enough to give birth to my mother and her sister, and then died
of childbirth fever. In those few years, her name was sometimes
anglicized to Clara. My mother named -me after the mother she
never knew. Leib remarried and lived to what was then considered
a ripe old age.
* * *
By profession, I'm a planetary astronomer. My job is to

examine other worlds. It's invigorating, exciting, even magical
work for me. And in the last few decades, the United States and
the former Soviet Union have accomplished something stunning and
historic -- the close-up examination of all those points of
rcury to-Sati
light, from Mercury to-Saturn, that moved our ancestors to wonder
and to science. We-have^ studied broiling,—cratered ir-cury_I_5P^
Verjus*—a—hellhole of a planet;—We^^tave—scrutinized the otunnijig__
r^r^^-Tyf- the* niftier ~p~T?rñeTíg~ HIICî L>m i r «nmy.imjly vnr+ngat-nri itinnnp.
[Introduction (2B, 2/20/93)]
Every one of these worlds is lovely and instructive. But, so far

as we know, they are also desolate and lifeless.
During the Viking mission to Mars, beginning in July 1976,
in a certain sense I spent a year on that planet. I lovingly
examined the boulders and sand dunes, the reddish sky, the
ancient river valleys, the soaring volcanic eminences, the
steppes in the polar terrain. But there was no life on that
planet — not a blade of grass, not a mouse, or a beetle, or
even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. For one reason or
another these worlds have apparently not been graced as our world
has with life. Life is a comparative rarity. You can have
dozens of worlds and on only one of them does life appear and
sustain itself.
Travel is Broadening.—-f«ave-we-^»sed—tilts-SeTTtence—4«-XCLSffiQ*
<arr t*luëwliëie9-}. We humans have progressed from believing that
there were no other worlds besides the Earth, to believing that
there were many other worlds in the Solar System, to an ebb and
flow of opinion about all of the worlds being inhabited or none
of them, to our present, still tentative conclusion that — in
this solar system at least — we are alone.
Having in all their lives up till then only crossed rivers,
Leib and Chaiya graduated to crossing oceans. But they had a
great advantage: They knew that on the other side of the waters
there would be ~ with strange customs, it is true — real human
beings speaking their language, sharing their values, people
indeed to whom they were closely related.

In my time we've crossed the Solar System and sent four
ships to the stars. Neptune lies a million times farther from
Earth than New York is from the banks of the Bug. But there are
no distant relatives, no humans, and apparently no life at all
waiting for my generation on those other worlds. We have no
letters sent home, by recent emigres, to help us understand these
new lands — only digital data transmitted at the speed of light
by robot emissaries with no feelings at all. These worlds are
not much like ours.
No one on Earth is rich enough to pay for the passage, so no
one can pick up and leave for Mars or Titan on a whim, or because
we're bored, or because we've been accused of a crime and must
flee the law. If we humans ever go to these worlds, it will be
because a consortium of nation-states believes it to be to the
advantage of the human species. Our present circumstances are
very different; there are a great many problems pressing in on us
and justly competing for the money it takes to send people to the
planets.
Of course, the fact that I have gone -- even vicariously,
via robots whose missions I helped design — so much farther than
my grandparents is hardly because of any special merit of my own.
Rather, it is due to the astonishing pace of technology, the fact
that by luck I was alive when we first built the ships to go to
other worlds. Through better medical practice, pharmaceuticals,
agriculture, contraception, advances in transportation and

communications, devastating new weapons of war, inadvertent side
effects of industry, and disquieting challenges to long-held
world views, science and technology have dramatically changed our
lives. Many of us are huffing and puffing to keep up, sometimes
only slowly grasping the implications of the new developments.
In the ancient human tradition, young people grasp change more
quickly than the rest of us — not just in running personal
computers and programming vidéocassette recorders, but also in
accommodating to new visions of our world and ourselves. The
current pace of change is much quicker than a human lifetime,
so fast as to work to rend the generations asunder. This book is
in part about understanding and accommodating tq^ .changos ~ both
for good and for ill -- brought on by science and technology.
[AD: Doesn't quite work.]
As I've said, the Earth is an anomaly. In all the Solar
System, it is, so far as we know, the only inhabited planet. We
humans are one among millions of separate species who live on a
world burgeoning, overflowing with life. And yet, most species
that ever were are no more. After flourishing for 180 million
years, the dinosaurs were extinguished. Every last one. There
are none left. No species is guaranteed its tenure on this
planet. And we've been here for only about a million years, we,
the first species that has devised means for its self-
destruction. We are rare and precious because we are alive,
because we can think. We are privileged to influence and perhaps

control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for
life on Earth — not just for ourselves, but for all those,
humans and others, who cane before us, and to whom we are
beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come
after. There is no cause more urgent, no dedication more fitting
than to protect the future of our species. Nearly all our
problems are made by humans and can be solved by humans. No
social convention, no political system, no economic hypothesis,
no religious dogma is more important. That is also what this
book is about.
[2B, 2/20/93]
A Pale Blue Dot
The spacecraft was a long way from home ~ beyond the orbit
of the outermost planet and high above the ecliptic (an imaginary
plane which we can think of as something like a racetrack in
which the orbits of the planets are confined). The ship was
speeding away from the Sun at 40,000 miles per hour. But in
early February of 1990, it was overtaken by a message from Earth,
an unusual and unexpected set of new instructions.
Obediently, it turned its cameras back toward the now-
distant planets. Slewing from one spot in the sky to another, it
took 60 pictures and stored them on its tape recorder. Then,
slowly, in March, April, and May, it radioed the images back to
Earth. Each picture was composed of 640,000 individual picture
elements (pixels), like the dots in a newspaper wirephoto or a
pointillist painting. The spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles away
from Earth, so far away that it took each pixel 5h hours,
traveling at the speed of light, to reach us. The pictures would
have been returned earlier, but the big ground-based radio
telescopes that receive these whispers from the edge of the Solar
System had responsibilities to other ships that ply the sea of
space — Magellan, bound for Venus, for example, and Galileo on
its tortuous passage to Jupiter.
Voyager 1 was so high above the ecliptic plane because, in
1981, it had made a close pass by Titan, the giant moon of
Saturn. Its sister ship, Voyager 2, was dispatched on a
["A Pale Blue Dot" (2B, 2/20/93)]
different trajectory, within the ecliptic plane, and so she was

able to perform her celebrated explorations of Uranus and
Neptune. The two Voyager robots have explored four planets and
nearly 60 moons. They have opened up most of the planetary part
of the Solar System to the human species. They were produced on
time, on budget and far exceeded their design specifications.
They are triumphs of human engineering and one of the few recent
glories of the American space program. They will be in the
history books when much else about our era is long forgotten.
The Voyagers were guaranteed to work only until the Saturn
encounter. So I thought it might be a good idea, just after
Saturn, to have one or both take a last glance homeward. The
point of such a picture would not be mainly scientific. I knew
that, even from Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for
Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point
of light, not even filling a single pixel, hardly distinguishable
from the many other points of light it could see, nearby planets
and far-off suns. But I thought that — precisely because of the
obscurity of our world thus revealed —> such a picture might be
useful.
Mariners had painstakingly mapped the coastlines of the
continents. Geographers had translated these findings into maps
and globes. Photographs of portions of the Earth had been
obtained by orbiting spacecraft — giving a perspective like the
one you achieve by positioning your eyeball about an inch from a
["A Pale Blue Dot" (2B, 2/20/93)]
large globe. While almost everyone understands that the Earth is

a sphere, all of us somehow glued to it by gravity, the reality
of this circumstance did not really dawn until the famous frame-
filling Apollo photographs of the whole Earth — the one taken by
the Apollo 17 crew on the last journey of humans to the Moon.
It has become a kind of icon of our age. There's Antarctica
at the bottom, and then all of Africa stretching up above it:
Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya, where the earliest humans lived.
At top right is Saudi Arabia and the Near East, and just barely
peeking out at the top is the Mediterranean Sea, around which so
much of the modern global civilization emerged. You can make out
the blue of the ocean, the yellow of the Sahara and the Arabian
deserts, the brown-green of vegetated areas.
And yet there is no sign of humans in this picture. Wè are
too small. There is also no sign of national boundaries. Our
statecraft is too insignificant to be seen from this vantage
point. The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to
multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of
worlds — much less stars or galaxies — humans are feeble and
inconsequential, a thin film of life on a single world. The
human pretension to centrality and cosmic importance seems
laughable from this perspective, our aspirations so out of touch
with reality.
It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one
taken from a hundred thousand times farther away, might help in
["A Pale Blue Dot" (2B, 2/20/93)]
further awakening ourselves to our true circumstances. Many in

NASA's Voyager Project were supportive. But did we want to take
a picture so close to the Sun as to risk burning out the
spacecraft's video system? Wouldn't it be better to delay until
all the scientific images — from Uranus and Neptune, if the
spacecraft lasted that long — were taken?
And so we waited — from 1981 at Saturn to 1989, when both
spacecraft had passed the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. At last
the time came. But there were some instrumental calibrations
that needed to be done first, and we waited a little longer.
Although we were in the right spot and the instruments were
working, a few project personnel opposed talcing this picture. It
wasn't science, they said. Then we discovered that the people
who devise and transmit the radio commands to Voyager were, in a
cash-strapped NASA, being laid off immediately or transferred to
other jobs. At the last minute ~ actually, in the midst of the
Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune — the NASA Administrator, then
Admiral Richard Truly, stepped in and made sure that these images
were taken.
So here they are — a mosaic of sguares laid down on top of
the planets and a smattering of more distant stars. We were able
to photograph not only the Earth but also six of the Sun's nine
known planets. Mercury, the innermost planet, was lost in the
glare of the Sun, and Mars and Pluto were too small, too poorly
lit, and/or too far away. Uranus and Neptune are smeared because
[••A Pale Blue Dot" (2B, 2/20/93)]
of the motion of the spacecraft; these planets are so dim that to

record their presence required long exposures. This Is what the
planets would look like to an alien spaceship entering the Solar
System after a long interstellar voyage.
Because of the way that sunlight is scattered off the
spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as
if there were some special importance to our small planet. But
this is just an accident of geometry and optics. The Sun emits
its radiation equitably to all directions in space.
And why that cerulean color? The blue comes partly from the
sea and partly from the sky. While water in a glass is
transparent, it absorbs slightly more red light than blue light.
If you have a kilometer of the stuff, the red light is absorbed
out and what gets reflected back to space is mainly blue.
Similarly, a short line of sight through air seems perfectly
transparent. Nevertheless — something Leonardo da Vinci
excelled at portraying — the more distant the object, the bluer
it seems. The reason is that the air bounces blue light around
much better than red light. So the blueness of this dot is due
to a deep transparent atmosphere and deep oceans of liquid water.
And the white? The Earth on an average day is about half covered
with white water clouds. We can explain this pale blueness
because we know the Earth well. Whether an alien scientist newly
arrived at the outskirts of our solar system could reliably
deduce oceans and clouds and a thickish atmosphere is less
["A Pale Blue Dot" (2B, 2/20/93)]
certain. Neptune, for instance, is blue, but for a wholly

different reason. From this distant vantage point, the Earth
might not ~ even to a very advanced alien being ~ seem of
particular interest.
But for us, it's different. Look at this pale blue dot.
That's here. That's home. That's us. On that dot everyone you
love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human
being who ever was, lived out their lives. Every act of human
heroism or betrayal, the sum total of human joy and suffering,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic
doctrines, every hunter and forager, every creator and destroyer
of civilization, every king and peasant, mother and father,
hopeful child,, inventor 1and explorer, moral teacher and corrupt
e**+y ÍMífíHf/ every "reprint Tt^J/tr-,*
politician, every saint and sinner in the history of our species
lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
What is the glory and triumph of the greatest conquerors and
builders of empires? They were the momentary masters of a
fraction of a blue dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-
importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in
the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our
planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In
our obscurity in all this vastness, there is no hint that help
will come from the outside to save us from ourselves. Doing that
is up to us.
["A Pale Blue Dot" (2B, 2/20/93)]
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.

There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our
species could migrate. It is a lovely, fragile, finite little
planet. But its importance lies only, I think, in what we make
of it.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-
building experience. There is perhaps no better technological
demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant
image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the
only home we have.
.ksA^h^è^s/î"
A Universe Not Made for Us

[lÛi^yeê-^ío^^íáîa^fbs^íB^s^
[Epigraph: from beginning of "Dover Beach."]
It almost never feels like prejudice. Rather, it seems

fitting and just — the idea that, because of an accident of
birth, our group (whichever one it is) has an otherwise unmerited
central position in the social universe. Among Pharaonic
princelings and Plantagenet pretenders, children of robber barons
and Central Committee officials, members of confident majorities,
obscure sects, and reviled minorities, this self-serving attitude
seems as natural as breathing. It is connected with sexism,
racism, nationalism, and the other deadly chauvinisms that
continue to plague our species. Uncommon strength of character
is needed to resist the blandishments of those who assure us that
we have an obvious, even God-given, superiority over our fellows.
Since scientists are people, it is not surprising that
comparable pretensions and conceits have entered the scientific
world view. Indeed, many of the central debates in the history
of science seem to be really contests about whether we humans are
special. Almost always the going-in position is that we are
special, and at the end of the debate it turns out — in
["A Universe Not Made for Us" (2Bf 2/20/93)]
dishearteningly many cases — that we are not.

Our ancestors lived out-of-doors. They were as familiar
with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television
programs. The Sun, the Noon, the stars, and the planets all rose
in the east and set in the west, traversing the sky overhead in
the process. The motion of the stars was not merely a diversion,
eliciting a sense of awe; it was the only way to tell the time of
day and the seasons. For hunters and gatherers, as well as for
agricultural peoples, knowing about the sky was a matter of life
and death. How lucky for us that the Sun, the Noon, the planets,
and the stars are part of some elegantly configured cosmic
clockwork! Clearly they are put here for our benefit. Who else
makes use of them?
And if the celestial bodies rise and set around us, then
isn't it wholly evident that we're at the center of the Universe?
These bodies — so clearly suffused with unearthly powers,
especially the Sun on which we depend for light and heat — are
circling us, like courtiers attending a king. We might not
otherwise have guessed, but the most elementary examination of
the heavens reveals that we are special. The Universe seems
structured around human beings, created for us. It's difficult
to contemplate such a circumstance without experiencing some
stirrings of pride. The entire Universe, made for us! We must
be really something1
[HA Universe Not Made for üs" (2B, 2/20/93)]
This satisfying demonstration of our self-importance,

buttressed by daily observations of the heavens, made the
geocentrist conceit a transcultural truth — taught in the
schools, built into the language, part and parcel of great
literature and sacred scripture. Dissenters were discouraged,
sometimes with torture and death. It is no wonder that for the
vast bulk of human history, no one questioned it. Aristotle and
Plato and almost all the great philosophers and scientists of all
cultures over the last 3,000 years bought into this delusion.
Many busied themselves figuring out how the Sun, the Moon, the
stars, and the planets could be cunningly attached to absolutely
transparent, crystalline spheres ~ the big spheres, of course,
centered on the Earth — that would explain the complicated
motions of the celestial bodies so painstakingly chronicled by
generations of astronomers.
And yet — never mind how many kings, popes, savants and
philosophers were convinced of the contrary — the Earth through
all those millennia stubbornly persisted in orbiting the Sun.
You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer
looking down on our species over all that time -- with us
excitedly chattering, "The Universe created for us! We're at the
center! Everything pays homage to us!" — and concluding that
this must be the planet of the idiots.
But that judgment is too harsh. We did the best we could.
There irais an unlucky coincidence between common sense
["A Universe Not Made for Us" (2B, 2/20/93)] 4
•
observations and what we secretly hoped would be true. We tend
not to be especially critical when presented with evidence that
seems to affirm our prejudices.
Beginning with Copernicus in the middle fifteenth century,
the issue was formally joined. The idea of the Sun rather than
the Earth at the center of the Universe was generally treated as
a mere computational convenience, not an astronomical reality —
that is, the Earth was at the center of the Universe, as
everybody knew and as the Bible taught; but if you wished to know
where Jupiter would be on the second Tuesday of November the year
after next, you were permitted to pretend that the Sun was at the
center. Then you could calculate away ./p,^ ¿(.^ +l»»^^t r n0/~\ . , ,, ,~
However, when Galileos-discovered that Jupiter had a littl
rfcling it, and that Mercury and Venus jgent
/" *J
through phases^l>kê the Moon, the Earth-centered Universe beg
to crumble. By the time Isaac Newton demonstrated that very
simple and elegant physics could quantitatively explain all the
observed lunar and planetary motions — provided you assumed the
Sun at the center of the Solar System — the traditional view was
overturned. The geocentrist conceit utterly collapsed. Or so it
seemed.
It was not until the nineteenth century that direct
observations of the stars demonstrated the Earth indeed to be
circling the Sun (through the discovery of the "annual parallax"
of the stars). But by then scientific geocentrists were ¿land -aa
["A Universe Not Made for Us" (2B, 2/20/93)]
/Aw Tm. kri'ndf
ftemmaü»» Once most scientists were convinced, informed public

opinion swiftly changed. 1-4if Mm. i-^riri¡|îa who
earlier had threatened/the aged"~gaTiieo<wit:n rorture«if he
persisted in teaching the abominable doctrine that the Earth
moved/*mfthere were still some who resisted, who tried to prevent
the new sun-centered Universe from becoming known.
Every other proposal, and there have been a long sequence of
them, to remove the human species from cosmic center stage has
been resisted, in part for reasons that emotionally all seem
rather similar. We crave privilege, emanating not from our works
but from our birth, from the mere fact that we were born on this
planet or among such-and-such a people. We might call it the
anthropocentric — the "human-centered" -- conceit. If chimps
had a cosmology, I bet it would be "chimpocentric," and a dolphin
cosmology "delphinocentric." It's an easy mistake to make.
By the seventeenth century there might have been some hope
that, even if the Earth is not the center of everything, the
Earth is the only planet, the only "world," in the Universe. But
telescopic observations of the Moon and the other planets made it
clear that they had as much claim to being worlds as the Earth
does — with mountains, atmospheres, ice caps, clouds, and, in
the case of Saturn, a dazzling, unheard-of set of circumferential
rings. They might be profoundly different from our planet. None
might be as clement or as habitable. But the Earth was hardly
the only world.
Well, it was then widely held, even if the Earth isn't at

the center of the Universe, the Sun is. The Sun is our Sun. The
Earth is approximately at the center of the Universe. In this
way some of our pride could be saved. But by the nineteenth
century, observational astronomy had made clear that the Sun was
but one star among huge numbers, part of a lens-like, self-
gravitating assemblage of suns called the Milky Way Galaxy. Far
from being at the center of the Galaxy, our Sun with its retinue
of tiny planets lies in an undistinguished arc of an obscure
spiral arm.
Well, then, at least the Milky Way Galaxy is at the center
of the Universe. No, this notion is wrong as well. The Milky
Way Galaxy is one of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of
galaxies distinguished neither in mass nor in brightness nor in
how its stars are configured. When the expansion of the Universe
was first discovered, many people naturally gravitated to the
idea that the Milky Way Galaxy was at the center of the
expansion, all of the other galaxies running away from us. But
we now recognize that astronomers on any galaxy would see all of
the other galaxies running away from them; they would — unless
they were very careful -- conclude that they were at the center
of the Universe. There is, in fact, no center, at least in
three-dimensional space.
Well, even if there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
each with hundreds of billions of stars, maybe none of those
other stars has planets. Because planets are small and don't
shine by their own light, they're hard to find, even around the
nearest star, Alpha Centauri. There was once a popular view that
our solar system was formed by the near collision of the ancient
Sun with another star, the gravitational tidal interaction
pulling out tendrils of sunstuff which condensed into planets.
Since space is mainly empty and near stellar collisions
exceedingly rare, it was confidently concluded that very few
other planetary systems existed -- perhaps only one, around that
other star that long ago co-parented the worlds of our solar
system. (Early in my astronomical career, I was amazed and
disappointed that such a view had ever been taken seriously, and
that the absence of evidence for planets was considered evidence
for the absence of planets.)
Today quite firm evidence exists for two Earthlike planets
orbiting an extremely dense star called a pulsar. (The planets
show up in the timing residuals of the beacons of radio waves
that the rapidly rotating neutron star casts across the Earth.)
And we've found, for more than half the stars like the Sun, that
during the first few million years of their lives they're
surrounded by great disks of gas and dust out of which planets
seem to be forming. Other planetary systems look to be a cosmic
commonplace.
Well, if we can't find anything special about our position,
maybe there's something special about our motion. Newton and all
["A Universe Not Made for Us" (2B, 2/20/93)1 8
the great classical physicists believed that the velocity of the

Earth in space constituted a "privileged frame of reference."
That's actually what it was called. Albert Einstein considered
this attitude a remnant of an increasingly discredited Earth
chauvinism. It seemed to him that the laws of Nature must be the
same no matter what the velocity of the observer. With this as
his starting point, he formulated the Special Theory of
Relativity. Its consequences are bizarre, counterintuitive, and
grossly contradict common sense ~ especially at very high
speeds. But careful and repeated observations show that the
justly celebrated Special Relativity is an accurate description
of how the world is made, no matter what our preferences. There
are no privileged frames of reference.
Well, even if our position, our motion, and our world are
not uniquef maybe we are. We're different from the other
animals» We're specially created. The particular devotion of
the Creator of the Universe is evident in us. This position was
passionately defended on religious and other grounds. But in the
middle nineteenth century Charles Darwin showed convincingly how
one species can evolve into another by entirely natural
processes, which come down to saving which heredities work and
rejecting those that don't. The profound connections of humans
with chimpanzees and all the other life forms on Earth has been
compellingly demonstrated in the late twentieth century by the
new field of molecular biology.
In each age the chauvinist predispositions are challenged in

yet another arena of scientific debate ~ in this century, for
example, in attempts to understand the nature of human sexuality,
the existence of the unconscious mind, and the fact that many
psychiatric illnesses and character defects may have a molecular
origin. But let me skip over these and instead mention some
others:
Well, even ¿f we're closely related to some of the other
animals, we're different — not just in degree, but in kind — on
the really important questions; reasoning ability, tool making.
religion, ethics, altruism, language, nobility of character.
While humans, like all animals, have traits that set them apart
— if this were not true, how could we distinguish one species
from another? — my own sense is that human uniqueness has been
exaggerated, sometimes grossly so. (Ann Druyan and I run through
the evidence in our book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.) But
because we have not opened up a clear communications channel
between the minds of other animals and ourselves, we cannot yet
be absolutely sure about some of these traits.
Well, maybe we're not much, maybe we're humiliâtingly
related to monkeys, but we're the best there is. We're the only
really intelligent beings in the Universe. The simple fact is
that we are in the earliest stages of looking for
extraterrestrial life. We have not found it yet. The question
is wide open. If I had to guess — especially considering our
["A Universe Not Made for UsM (2B, 2/20/93)] 10
long sequence of failed chauvinisms — I would guess that the

Universe is filled with beings far more intelligent, far more
advanced than we are. But this is at best a plausibility
argument, not a scientific demonstration. The question is among
the most fascinating in all of modern science.
Perhaps the clearest indication that the search for an
unmerited privileged position for humans will never fully die is
what is called the Anthropic Principle. It would be better named
the Anthropocentric Principle. It comes in various forms. The
"weak" anthropic principle merely notes that if the laws of
Nature had been different, the course of events leading to the
origin of humans would never have been taken. Under other
imaginary laws, atoms would not hold together, or stars would
evolve so quickly that there would be insufficient time for life
to evolve on nearby planets, or the chemical elements of which
life is made would never have been generated, and so on. If it
were an inverse cube instead of an inverse square in the law of
gravity, then planets would quickly spiral into their stars and
be burned to a crisp. There is no controversy about the weak
anthropic principle: Change the laws of Nature, if you could,
and a very different Universe would develop — in many cases, a
Universe incompatible with us. The "strong" anthropic principle
goes farther, and some of its advocates come close to deducing
that the laws of Nature and the values of the physical constants
were established so that humans would eventually come to be.
[Rootatc*. ] In this way, although in a more sophisticated form,

the ancient doctrine that the Universe was made for us is
resuscitated.
To me it sounds like playing one hand of bridge, winning the
game, knowing that there are [fill in number] possible
other hands that I was equally likely to have been dealt. . . and
then deducing that there is a god of bridge who has arranged the
cards and the shuffle with my victory foreordained from the
beginning. [Check with Barrow and Tippler.] We do not know how
many other hands there are in the cosmic deck, how many other
kinds of universes, laws of Nature, and physical constants that
could also lead to life and intelligence and conceits of self-
importance. Since we know next to nothing about how the Universe
was made — or even if it was made — it's difficult to pursue
the question constructively. Einstein's formulation was whether
God had any choice in creating the Universe. Perhaps there is
only a limited set of laws of Nature that go together
consistently. Perhaps the Universe is infinitely old and the
question of why it is as it is is meaningless.
But if self-congratulatory pretensions even among scientists
have now retreated to bastions impervious to experiment (we are
unlikely to be creating universes to test the Anthropic Principle
anytime soon), then the sequence of battles with human chauvinism
would seem to be, at least largely, won. We could not have known
beforehand that the evidence would be so repeatedly and
["A universe Not Made for Us" (2B, 2/20/93)]
4 » *■ c# //•.*.-,
thoroughly incompatible with the proposition that the huifiarH ^-«-«.^v***/*

species is at cosmic center stage. Instead, the debates have
been settled decisively in favor of a position thajc, however
painful, can be summarized in a single sentence:/ There is
nothing special about us. y4 S$-/mt\*% f*^.'S''»n *A//f SSi
4U SX»y* ^*S A. *+-+*'
No matter what the scientists say, in everyday life we often

ignore the evidence. We do not talk about the Earth turning, but
rather about the Sun rising and/setting. "What a beautiful
sunset," we say, or "I'm up byefore sunrise." We haven't even
been able to find a graceful locution to -match/the Copernican
insight. We are covert ge'ocentrists. We at the center and
everything else circling/around us is built into our languages
and therefore taught to/ our children. Polls show that something
like 20 percent of American adults do not know that the Earth
goes around the Sun. *3|I can find in my undergraduate classes at
Cornell University bright students who do not know that the stars
rise and set at night, and in a poll of graduating seniors at
Harvard University, percent thought that it's hotter in
summer because the Earth is then closer to the Sun.$
Through science fiction and our educational system, NASA and
the role that science plays in society, Americans have much more
exposure to the Copernican perspective than the average person on
[3-23-93.atl]
An insert into A. Pale Blue Dot:

■4-Footnote-H- The International Astronomical Union has
recommended that the definite article be excised in all names of
celestial bodies: thus, Sun, Earth, and Moon, instead of the
Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. Presumably we should describe the
Milky Way as Galaxy, instead of the Galaxy. The intent is
admirable — a real attempt to break loose ef some our
astronomical chauvinisms. But I can't bring myself to do it. In
spoken speech, we lose the distinction between our planet and a
clump of humus. And such locutions as "Moon goes around Earth;
Earth goes around Sun" sound like a literal translation from one
of those many languages that lack definite articles. It may be
that Western European languages are especially prone to the
anthropocentrism of the definite article. I recognize that my
inability to change may be a species of oldfogeyism. fGic in—
Ame^—Her. Dict^-¡ Fi ngl Q wnH , ]
[3-23-93.atl]
Insert C for A Pale Blue Dot, [chapter?]; also for the

Gifford Lectures:
To its credit, although rather belatedly, the Roman Catholic
Church has invalidated its 1633 condemnation of Galileo for
advocating that the Earth goes around the Sun. Unfortunately,
s *«-
the Church still cannot quite bring itself to acknowledge thaL it
rmrlp a ff?ri^,is mistad and ^fiFit it hrH n^ righ+- mafrlnj
prnnnnnnfMi^rrfm nn ninJ-hg-ra rtf ctf-i grtc.g f union IPSS thraatftning and
\T\\ imirlai^-rwj pm ipl g uhn ^ ^ rt TIA*- A/JVfla f VSA'K--KhT3--<a^«-W^nf aTOlin^^,
the-Eagth. In a 1992 speech Pope John Paul II says, "From the

beginning of the Age of Enlightenment down to our own day, the
Galileo case has been a sort of 'myth' in which the image
fabricated out of the events is quite far removed from reality.
In this perspective, the Galileo case was a symbol of the
Catholic Church's supposed rejection of scientific progress, or
of 'dogmatic' obscurantism opposed to the free search for truth."
•But he7does .go on to add: "The error of the theologians of
the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was
to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure
was in some way imposed by the literal sense of Sacred
Scriptures."
Here indeed considerable progress has been made — although
proponents of other fundamentalist faiths will be distressed to
hear from-^the—Pope—thatSacred Scripture is not inerrant, but
-J.L* M-tii-u 1273». ut'îY/fN ' ■ —■ " ■ •*
'5^4- f^r*iy^ ^«A-.'nj SÍ-U .'// *n/ *]LÂ*r\y £«.l,Ue f» C¿#tüc ,*¿-
T-Ve ¡Ki,frml,Tll-)i 0*\- ^rHrt IK i-Lm- C#«n~t,„s S$- */_/.-

C-Amrck &.£*;ts i'uít- SweA An /„/e^*r«./. /,>0
Earth. It may very well be, then, that more than four and a half
centuries after Copernicus, most people on Earth still think that
our planet sits immobile at the center of the Universe.
We talk about "the" world, as if our planet were the only
one (and "the" Sun and "the" Moon). Maybe it's reassuring.
There are eight other planets in this solar system, dozens of
moons, thousands of asteroids, and trillions of comets. But that
needn't -bothw us, if ours is "the" world.
SU*** ,
t)nly nine percent of Americans share Darwin's view that
human beings (and all the other species of life now on Earth)
have slowly evolved through specific natural processes from a
succession of simpler and more ancient precursors. Evolution is
still being fought — in the schools, in the courts, and on the
question of just how much pain physicians and scientists can
inflict on other animals without crossing some ethical threshold.
Many of us do not want to believe that other animals have
language skills comparable to a human two-year-old, or
technologies that humans cannot duplicate, or «a*ejmore willing
than we are to suffer so that their fellows will not. Many
people are dismissive, even angry, about such claims. One well-
known philosopher argues that if intelligent extraterrestrials
exist but lack human form, they are not "persons" and need not be
given the respect or legal protection that they would otherwise
be owed. No matter how smart they are — this is what the
argument seems to come down to ~ if they don't look like us,
it's okay to slaughter them. Nonhuman intelligence, both on

Earth and elsewhere, is another battleground.on which th
anthropocentric conceit is being tested 9 9*f «w
■ *i f..W t it
These chauvinisms have practical The- Earth—is
a tiny meadow in a vast, bíaote, empty wasteland. *r-If incteed we "++
imagined éfe^rhe center of the Universe and ourselves the reason
that the Universe was made, then would we make our best effort to
care for our meadow? Human beings are exquisitely dependent on a
complex network of relationships with other organisms, many of
them quite humble. If we imagined that we were put here to have
"dominion" over Nature, would we scrupulously protect those other
beings who share this world with us? Are our chances of survival
better or worse if va^Jj*nV the* courage to see the Universe as it
really is? /"fa***- •**'•• 7' y*"''*! *~+"f'"f*^*i
Of course,- 1rs nul~müch fun to have a gaggle of scientists
incessantly haranguing you with "-You're nut iiuyuiLdiiL, vuu'ro not^
important.^ Even unexcitable people might get annoyed with this
incantation after a while. Maybe it seems that the scientists
are getting some weird satisfaction out of putting humans down.
Why can't they find some way in which we're superior? Lift our
spirits1 In such debates science seems cold and remote,
unresponsive to human needs.
But surely we'll never be able to improve our circumstances
if we lie to ourselves about what those circumstances are. If we
were central and important in the Cosmos, it would be good to
know that. Whatever twists and turns along the way, it will all
work out. There's a Deus ex machina waiting in the wings. But
if we are peripheral and insignificant, it is even more important
to know that. If in error we believed that the world was made
for us, we night be much more complacent about the harm we do
from greed, inattention, ignorance, or stupidity. If we are what
the Universe is about, we may be dangerously negligent about our
future.
This is why — if we humans are not the heroes of the entire
cosmic drama — Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, and the other
pioneers of deprovincialization have provided a key public
service: They have alerted us to a grave peril, which perhaps
can be described as hubris compounded by complacency. Two or
three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the
Universe was made for us. It was a thesis consistent with what
we thought we knew. But we have learned much in the interim.
Holding such a position today amounts to willful neglect of the
evidence, and a shameful resistance to self-knowledge.
These deprovincializations rankle. Even if they do not
fully carry the day, they erode confidence, unlike the happy
anthropocentric certitudes, rippling with social utility, of an
earlier age. Our time is burdened under the cumulative influence
of more debunkings of the anthropocentric conceit than any
previous historical epoch: We live in the cosmic boondocks. We
emerged from the slime. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and
feelings are not entirely under our own control. There may be
much smarter and very different beings elsewhere. And on top of
all this, we're making a mess of our planet. Many of us wish
this bill of particulars were otherwise. It weighs on us. It
has a train of implications. It undermines human confidence. It
raises awkward questions about what our responses should be.
Some of us may feel called upon to act. But it is much easier to
be complacent and hope for the best.
It's hard to be human without feeling some glimmer of
resentment about these attacks on human chauvinism. But, it
seems to me, the gains from this new perspective far outweigh the
losses. We find ourselves, trembling just a little, on the
threshold of a vast and awesome Universe, rich in mystery and
promise, that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in
potential — the tidy anthropocentric world of our ancestors. We
are peering across billions of light years of space to view the
Universe shortly after the Big Bang. We are reading the genetic
language in which is written the nature and propensities of every
being on Earth. We are peering down into the core of the Earth.
We have developed medicines that have saved the lives of billions
of people. We have sent dozens of ships to more than sixty
nearby worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to
be proud of our discoveries, and to judge our merit in part by
the science that so deflated our pretensions.
["A Universe Not Made for UsM (2B, 2/20/93)] 17
Most of these debates were entered into with no thought for

their practical implications. Passionate and curious humans wish
to understand their actual circumstances, how unique or
pedestrian they and their world are, their ultimate origins and
destinies. Surprisingly, some of these debates have yielded the
most profound practical results. The very method of mathematical
reasoning that Isaac Newton introduced to explain the motion of
the planets around the Sun has led to most of the technology of
our modern world.
But it might have been otherwise. It might have been that
the balance lay elsewhere, that humans by and large did not want
to know the truth, that they were unwilling to permit challenges
to the prevailing wisdom, that they would not spend government or
private money to uncover a disquieting Universe. Despite stout
resistance in every age, it is very much to the credit of our
species that we have allowed ourselves to follow the evidence, to
draw conclusions that at first seem so unpalatable and daunting:
a Universe not made for us, a Universe so much larger and older
that our personal and historical experience is dwarfed and
humbled.
There is a related danger. Conceits about the superiority
of our position or motion or planet or species are but a step
from believing that our particular sex or race or ethnic group
has some intrinsic superiority. Many of us humans are still
focused on and transfixed by human differences — men giving
[3-23-93.atl]
An-inseit into A Paie Blue-Dot:

Every time it is suggested that humans "nave a biological
propensity for certain behavior — dominance, ethnocentrism,
xenophobia, rape — the objection is heard that this is a
'justification for tyranny and ethnic hatred and sexual violence.
Of course the cultural and social environment plays an enormous
»f*/i'i'*»»i'/i'»»i/
role, encouraging some propone it ies and discouraging others. -But
$ predisposition -does -not moan-an inevitability^—and «the -
ax-ietenca ef/q predisposition to hate might very well be balanced
by a predisposition to love. But we are afraid to hear that some
of our,behavior, which can be read, in any newspaper on any given
day, has a biological basis, Je want to believe we're above all
that.
A,
3 t~+ *^-* «*
i *\ S
thanks each day to God that they were not born women, one race
characterizing another as "apes" or "devils," nations making fun
of one another's customs and languages, one ethnic group ready to
make any sacrifice to visit vengeance on another in feuds and
vendettas that trace back to the dawn of recorded history. The
lesson is very hard to learn» It's as if we're born ready to
cast our lot passionately with any random group or circumstance;
whoever we're related to or whoever gets to teach us first, we're
for them forever, and against all others. Both in understanding
how the Universe really works and in designing a society that
really works, self-congratulatory conceits constitute a major
obstacle.
Today we are raced with a seguence of unparalleled crises
regarding the global environment, the growth of the world
population, [the spread of epidemic diseases?], and matters of
simple equity and fairness and respect for those less
advantageously circumstanced. And yet we are willing to explore
the fine structure of matter, life, the planets, the stars, and
the distant galaxies. We are bravely examining what would seem
to be the last testable self-congratulatory chauvinism — the
contention that in all this great Universe of a hundred billion
galaxies and a billion trillion stars, there is no species so
wise, so intelligent, so advanced as we. We may misuse our
technology. We may be disastrously short-sighted. Some of us
may seek to suppress a truth which does not correspond to our
•
preconceptions. But in our courageous pursuit of the unknown, we
may find a saving grace.
The hard truth seems to be this: We live in an immense and
ancient universe — in which, daily, sons are made and worlds
destroyed — while humanity, newly arrived, clings to an obscure
clod of rock and metal. There is design without a doubt. But
while we are forever hoping to find a Designer, we keep
discovering that natural processes can extract order out of
chaos. The evidence does not unambiguously reveal a Designer.
Maybe there is one, but it certainly has not revealed itself
enough to convince even a moderately scrupulous skeptic.
The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is
determined then only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the
custodians of life's meaning. We would prefer there to be a
cosmic Parent who will care for us, forgive us our errors and
save us from ourselves. But I believe it is better to *«*»* a
disappointing truth than to embrace a reassuring lie [ui'veir?] »
If we long for some cosmic importance, then it is our
responsibility, rather than pretending to what we do not yet
have, to make ourselves significant.
Meanwhile, there is a lesson to be drawn from these
scientific debates: Be wary when evidence is adduced of the
superiority of our planet, our species, or any subgroup of
humans. We are not at our best when so tempted.
[2, 2/20/93]
IS THERE INTELLIGENT LIFE Off EARTH?
[FROM THE ANNALS OF AN ALIEN LIFE DETECTION MISSION]
[Italicized:]
There are places, in and around our great cities, where the
natural world has all but disappeared. You can make out streets
and sidewalks, autos, parking garages, advertising signs,
monuments of glass and steel, but not a tree or a blade of grass
or any animal f- besides, of course, the humans. There are lots
of humans. Only if you look up through the skyscraper canyons
can you make out a star or a patch of blue — reminders of what
was there long before humans came to be. But the bright lights
of big cities bleach out the stars, and even that patch of blue
is often gone, tinted brown by technology.
It's not hard, going to work every day in such a place, to
be impressed with ourselves. How we have transformed the Earth
for our benefit and convenience1 But a hundred miles up or down
there are no humans (except for an increasingly rare handful in
transit). Apart from a thin film of life at the very surface of
the Earth, a few intrepid spacecraft, and some radio static, our
impact on the Universe is nil. It knows nothing about us.
[End of italics.]
* * *
You're an alien explorer entering the Solar System after a

[MIs There Intelligent Life on Earth?" (2, 2/20/93)]
long journey through the blackness of interstellar space. You

examine the planets of this humdrum star from afar — a pretty
handful, some gray, some blue, some red, some yellow. You're
interested in what kinds of worlds these are, whether their
environments are changing, and especially whether there is life
and intelligence. You have no prior knowledge of the Earth. You
have just discovered its existence.
There's a galactic ethic, let's imagine, about looking but
not touching. You can fly by these worlds; you can orbit them;
but you are strictly forbidden from landing. Under such
circumstances, could you figure out what the Earth's environment
is like and whether anyone lives there?
Your first impression on seeing a picture of the whole Earth
is white clouds, white polar caps, brownish continents, and some
bluish substance that covers two-thirds of the surface. You
cannot know beforehand the composition of any of these. When you
measure the temperature of this world from the infrared radiation
it emits, you find that most latitudes are above the freezing
point of water, while the polar caps are below the freezing
point. Water is a very abundant material in the Cosmos; polar
caps made of solid water would be a reasonable guess, as well as
clouds of solid and liquid water. You might be tempted to
conclude that the blue stuff is vast quantities -— kilometers
deep — of liquid water. But this suggestion is bizarre, at
least as far as this solar system is concerned, because surface
["Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?" (2, 2/20/93)]
oceans of liquid water exist on none of the other worlds.

However, when we look in the visible and near-infrared spectrum
for telltale signatures of chemical composition, sure enough we
find enough water vapor in the air to account for the clouds, and
just the amount that must exist because of evaporation if the
oceans are in fact made of liquid water.
The spectrometers also reveal that the air on this world is
almost one-fifth oxygen, 02. No other planet in the Solar System
has anything close to so much oxygen. Where does it come from?
The intense ultraviolet light from the Sun breaks water down into
oxygen and hydrogen, and hydrogen quickly escapes to space. This
is a source of 02, sure enough, but it doesn't easily account for
so much oxygen. Another possibility is that ordinary visible
light is used to break water apart — except there's no known way
to do this without life. If you're a good skeptical scientist,
then, the 02 would be not proof of life, but only the merest
hint*
With all that oxygen you're not surprised to discover ozone
in the atmosphere, because ultraviolet light makes ozone (O3) out
of oxygen (02). The ozone then absorbs dangerous ultraviolet
radiation. So if the oxygen is due to life, there's a curious
sense in which the life is protecting itself. But this life
might be photosynthetic plants. A high level of intelligence is
not implied.
["Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?*1 (2, 2/20/93)]
When you examine the continents more closely, you find there
are, crudely speaking, two kinds of regions. One shows the
spectrum of ordinary sorts of rocks and minerals found on many
worlds. The other reveals something unusual: a material —
covering vast areas — that strongly absorbs red light. This
pigment is just the sort of thing needed if ordinary visible
light was being used to break water apart and account for the
oxygen in the air. It's another hint — this time a little
stronger — of life, not a bug here and there, but of a planetary
surface chock full of life. This pigment is in fact chlorophyll;
it absorbs in the blue as well as the red, and is responsible for
the fact that plants are green. What you're seeing is a densely
vegetated planet.
When you look carefully at the infrared spectrum of the
Earth, you find many minor constituents of the air. In addition
to water, there's carbon dioxide (C02), methane (CH4), and other
gases which absorb the heat that the Earth tries to radiate away
to space at night. These gases warm the planet. Without them,
the Earth would everywhere be below the freezing point of water.
You have readily discovered the greenhouse effect.
There's something odd about having methane and oxygen
together in the same atmosphere. The laws of chemistry are very
clear: In an excess of O2, CH4 should be entirely converted into
H2O and C02- The process is so efficient that at equilibrium not
a single molecule in all the Earth's atmosphere should be
["Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?" (2, 2/20/93)}
methane. In fact, you find one out of every million molecules is

methane, an immense discrepancy.
The only possible explanation is that methane is being
injected into the Earth's atmosphere so quickly that its chemical
reaction with O2 can't keep pace. What could the source of this
methane be? Maybe it's left over from the early history of the
Solar System, before the origin of life, but quantitatively this
doesn't seem to work. The only alternatives are biological.
This conclusion makes no assumptions about the chemistry of life,
but merely follows from how hard it is to be so far from chemical
equilibrium. In fact, the methane in the Earth's atmosphere
arises from such sources as bacteria in bogs, the cultivation of
rice, the burning of vegetation, natural gas from oil wells, and
— I'm trying to put this decorously — bovine flatulence. In an
oxygen atmosphere, it is a sign of life.
It's a little disquieting that the intimate intestinal
activities of cows should be detectable from interplanetary space
when, as we will see, so much of what we consider important and
hold dear is not. As an alien scientist flying by the Earth, you
would not be able to deduce cows, but you would almost certainly
deduce life.
All the signs of life that we've discussed so far are due to
comparatively simple forms. Had your spacecraft flown by the
Earth a hundred million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs,
when there were no humans and no technology, you would still have
seen oxygen and ozone, the pigment of chlorophyll, and far too
much methane. But your instruments are also finding signs not
just of life, but of high technology —- something that couldn't
possibly have been detected a hundred million years ago. You are
detecting radio transmission from the Earth ~ at just the
frequencies where radio waves begin to leak out of the Earth's
ionosphere, which reflects and absorbs radio waves. The signal
is modulated (a sequence of ons and offs). The conclusion that
the radio transmission is due to technology on Earth holds no
matter what the ons and offs mean. You don't have to decode the
message to be sure it is a message. (In fact, the signal is a
communications relay from the U.S. Navy to its distant nuclear
submarines.)
So as an alien explorer you would know that at least one of
the species of beings on Earth has achieved radio technology.
Which ones? The ones that make methane, the ones that make
oxygen, the ones whose pigment colors the landscape green? Or
somebody else, somebody more subtle, somebody not so readily
apparent to a flyby spacecraft? To search for this technological
species, you might want to examine the Earth in finer and finer
detail, seeking, if not the beings themselves, at least their
artifacts.
You look first with modest telescopes, so the finest detail
you can make out is about one or two kilometers across. At this
level of detail, you can make out no strange formations, no
obvious signs of life. You observe a dense atmosphere in motion.

The abundant water must evaporate and then rain back down on the
ground, so there must be running water. The ancient impact
craters, apparent on the Earth's nearby Moon, are almost wholly
absent. There must then be a set of processes whereby new land
is created and then eroded away in much less time than the age of
this world. As you look with finer and finer definition you find
mountain ranges, river valleys, and many other indications that
this planet is geologically active.
There are many places surrounded by vegetation, though, but
which are themselves denuded of plants. They look like
discolored smudges on the landscape. (Many of them are in fact
large cities, but you'd never be able to prove it unless you
looked at higher resolution.)
When you examine the Earth at about 100-meter resolution,
everything changes. The planet is revealed to be covered with
straight lines, squares, rectangles, circles ~ of a regularity
and complexity that would be hard to explain except by life and
intelligence. You would not know what all this was about.
Perhaps all you would conclude is that the dominant life forms on
the planet have a simultaneous passion for territoriality and
Euclidean geometry. You would at this resolution not be able to
see them, much less know them.
When you take pictures at a few meters resolution, you find
that the crisscrossing straight lines of the cities and the long
straight lines that connect the cities seem to be filled with

beings a few meters in length — that at night turn on two bright
lights in front so they can see where they're going. The streets
of the cities, the roadways of the countryside are clearly built
for the benefit of these beings. Some Of them, when their
workday is done, go to little houses to retire for the night. At
last you have detected the source of all the technology, the
dominant life form on the planet. You might begin to believe
that you were really beginning to understand life on Earth. And
perhaps you'd be right. (If the resolution improved just a
little further, you would discover tiny parasites that
occasionally enter and exit the dominant organisms.)
All the images so far you've taken in reflected sunlight —
that is, on the day side of the planet. But something most
interesting is revealed when you photograph the Earth at night.
The planet is lit up like a Christmas tree. The brightest
region, near the Arctic Circle, is lit by the aurora borealis —
generated not by life, but by protons from the Sun. Everything
else you see is due to life. The lights outline the same
continents that you can make out in daylight, and many correspond
to the cities that you've already mapped. The cities are
concentrated near the coastlines. They tend to be sparser in
continental interiors. Perhaps the dominant organisms are
desperate for seawater (or maybe oceangoing ships were once
essential for trade and emigration).
Some of the lights, though, are not due to cities. In North

Africa and the Middle East, there are very bright lights in the
desert; they are due to the burnoff of oil and natural gas wells.
In the Sea of Japan there is a strange, triangular-shaped area of
light. In daylight it corresponds to open ocean. This is no
city. What could it be? It is in fact the Japanese squid
fishing fleet using brilliant illumination to attract schools of
squid to their deaths. This pattern of light wanders all over
the Pacific Ocean, seeking its prey. What in effect we have
discovered here is sushi. It is sobering that odds and ends of
life on Earth — the gastrointestinal habits of ruminants,
Japanese cuisine, or the means of communicating with nomadic
submarines that carry death for 200 cities — should be so
readily detectable, while so much of our art, literature,
science, and compassion are almost wholly invisible. It's a kind
of parable for our time.
By this point your expedition to the Earth must be
considered highly successful. You've characterized the
environment; you've detected life; you've found manifestations of
intelligent beings. Surely this planet is worth a longer and
more detailed study. That's why you've now inserted your
spacecraft into orbit around the Earth.
Looking down on the planet, you uncover new puzzles. All
over the planet, smokestacks are putting carbon dioxide and toxic
chemicals into the air. So are the beings who inhabit the
["Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?" (2, 2/20/93)] 10
roadways. But carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. As you watch,

the amount of it in the atmosphere increases steadily, year after
year. The same is true of methane and other greenhouse gases.
If this keeps up, the temperature of the planet is going to
increase steeply. Another class of molecules being injected into
the air are the chlorofluorocarbons. Not only are they
greenhouse gases, but they are very efficient in destroying the
protective ozone layer.
You look more closely at the center of the South American
continent, which — as you know by now — is a vast rain forest.
Every night you see thousands of fires. In the daytime you find
the region covered with smoke. Over the years, all over the
planet, you find less and less forest and more and more scrub
desert.
You look down on the large island of Madagascar. The rivers
are colored brown, generating a vast stain in the surrounding
ocean. This is topsoil being washed out to sea at a rate so high
that in another few decades there'll be none left. The same
thing is happening, you note, in many other places. But no
topsoil means no agriculture.
From your orbital perspective, you can see that something
has unmistakably gone wrong. The dominant organisms, whoever
they are — who have gone to so much trouble to rework the
surface — are simultaneously destroying their ozone layer and
their forests, eroding their topsoil, and performing massive,
uncontrolled experiments on their planet's climate. Haven't they

noticed what's happening? Are they oblivious to their fate? Are
they unable to work together on behalf of the environment that
sustains all of them? Perhaps, you think, it's time to reassess
the hypothesis that there is intelligent life on Earth.
* * *
[Box:]
A REAL SPACECRAFT LOOKS FOR LIFE ON EARTH
Spacecraft from the Earth have now flown by dozens of

planets, moons, comets, and asteroids -- eguipped with cameras,
instruments for measuring heat and radio waves, spectrometers to
determine composition, and a host of other devices. We have
found not a hint of life anywhere else in the Solar System. But
you might be skeptical about our ability to detect life
elsewhere, especially life different from the kind we know. And
until recently we had never performed the obvious calibration
test: to fly a modern interplanetary spacecraft by the Earth and
see whether we could detect ourselves. This all changed on
December 8, 1990.
Galileo is a spacecraft designed to explore the planet
Jupiter, its moons, and its rings. But to get there the
spacecraft had to come close by Venus (once) and the Earth
(twice) to be accelerated by the gravities of these planets;

otherwise there wasn't enough oomph to get it to where it's
going. This permitted us for the first time to look
systematically at the Earth from an alien perspective. Galileo
passed only 960 kilometers (about 600 miles) above the Earth's
surface. Except for pictures showing features finer than 1
kilometer, and the image of the Earth at night — obtained by
other, orbiting spacecraft! — all spacecraft data described in
this article were actually obtained by Galileo. Other members of
the NASA scientific team who worked with me on Galileo's
detection of life on Earth are Drs. w. Reid Thompson, Cornell
University; Robert Carlson, JPL; Donald Gurnett, University of
Iowa; and Charles Hord, University of Colorado.
»
[2B, 2/20/93]
Are We Being Visited? X.
It's still dark out. You're lying in bed, fully awake —

but, you discover, you're utterly paralyzed. You sense someone
in the room. You try to cry out. But you cannot» Several small
gray beings, less than four feet tall, are standing at the foot
of your bed. Their heads are pear-shaped and bald, and large for
their bodies. Their eyes are enormous, their faces
expressionless and identical. They wear tunics and boots. You
hope this is only a dream, but as nearly as you can tell it's
really happening. They lift you up and, eerily, they and you
slip through the wall of your bedroom and float out into the air,
rising high toward a metallic saucer-shaped spacecraft. There,
you are escorted into a medical examining room. A larger but
similar being — evidently some kind of physician — takes over.
What follows is even more terrifying.
Your body is probed with certain machines, especially your
sexual parts. If you're a man, they may take sperm samples; if
you're a woman, they may implant semen or remove ova or fetuses.
They may force you to have sex. Afterwards you may be ushered
into a different room where hybrid babies, partly human and
partly like these creatures, stare back at you. You may be given
an admonition about human misbehavior, especially in despoiling
the environment; scenes of future devastation are displayed.
["Are We Being Visited? I." (2B, 2/20/93)]
Finally, these cheerless gray emissaries usher you out of the

spacecraft and ooze you back through the walls into your bed. By
the time you're able to move and talk, they're gone.
You may not remember the incident right away; you night find
some period of time unaccountably missing. Because all of this
seems so bizarre, you're concerned about your sanity; naturally
you're reluctant to talk to anyone about it. At the same time
the experience is so disturbing that it's hard to keep it bottled
up forever. It all pours out when you hear similar accounts, or
when you're under hypnosis with a sympathetic therapist, or even
when you see a picture of an "alien" in one of the many popular
magazines and books on UFOs. Some people say they remember such
experiences from early childhood; their own children, they think,
are now being abducted by the aliens.
Host Americans seem to believe that we're being visited by
aliens in UFOs [1978 Gallup Poll]. In a recent Roper poll of
nearly 6,000 American adults, specially commissioned by those who
accept the alien abduction story at face value, 18 percent
reported sometimes waking up paralyzed, aware of one or more
strange beings in the room. Something like 13 percent report odd
episodes of missing time, and 10 percent claim to have flown
through the air without mechanical assistance. From these
results, the poll's sponsors conclude that two percent of all
Americans have been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from
other worlds. If aliens are not partial to Americans, the number
for the whole planet would be more than a hundred million people.
This means an abduction every few seconds. It's surprising that
more of the neighbors haven't noticed.
What's going on here? Could all these people be mistaken,
or lying, or hallucinating the same or a very similar story?
When you talk with them, most seem very sincere, although in the
grip of powerful emotions. A few psychiatrists who've examined
them find no more evidence of psychopathology than in the rest of
us. But could there really be a massive alien invasion,
repugnant medical procedures performed on millions of innocent
men, women, and children, and humans apparently used as breeding
stock over many decades — and all this not generally known and
dealt with by responsible media and the governments sworn to
protect the lives and well-being of their citizens?
Why should beings so advanced in physics and engineering —
crossing vast interstellar distances, walking like ghosts through
walls — be so backward when it comes to biology? Why, if the
aliens are trying to do their business in secret, wouldn't they
perfectly expunge all memories of the abductions? Why are the
examining instruments macroscopic and so reminiscent of doctors'
offices on Earth? Why go to all the trouble of repeated sexual
encounters between aliens and humans? Why not steal a few egg
and sperm cells, read the full genetic code, and then manufacture
as many copies with as many genetic variations as you like? Even
we humans — who cannot quickly cross interstellar space or
slither through vails — are able to clone cells. The

preoccupation with reproduction in these accounts raises a
warning flag — especially considering the uneasy balance between
sexual freedom and repression that has always characterized the
human condition, and the fact that we live in a time fraught with
numerous ghastly accounts, both true and false, of childhood
sexual abuse.
The pollsters never actually asked whether their subjects
had ever been abducted by aliens; they deduced it: Those who've
awakened with strange presences around them, ever unaccountably
seemed to fly through the air, and so on, have therefore been
abducted. The pollsters didn't even check to see if these
occurrences were part of the same or separate incidents. Their
conclusion — that millions of Americans have been so abducted —
seems extremely doubtful. Still, at least hundreds of people,
believing they have been abducted, have sought out sympathetic
therapists or joined abductee support groups. Others may have
similar complaints but, fearing ridicule or the stigma of mental
illness, have refrained from speaking up or getting help.
So which is more likely — that we're undergoing a massive
but generally overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or
that people are experiencing some internal mental state that they
do not understand? Admittedly, we're very ignorant both about
extraterrestrial beings, if any, and about human psychology. But
if these really were the only two alternatives, which would you
[••Are We Being Visited? I." (2B, 2/20/93)]
pick?
* * *
The phrase "flying saucer" was coined when I was in high

school. The newspapers were full of stories about ships from
elsewhere in the skies of Earth. It seemed pretty believable to
me. There were lots of other stars, many of which presumably had
planetary systems like ours. Many stars were as old or older
than the Sun, so there was plenty of time for intelligent life to
evolve on their planets. A two-stage rocket had just been flown
high above the Earth. Clearly we were on our way to the Moon and
the planets. Why shouldn't other, older beings be able to travel
from their star to ours?
This was only a few years after the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. So maybe the UFO occupants were worried about us.
They wanted to help us. Or maybe they wanted to make sure that
we and our nuclear weapons didn't come and bother them. Many
people seemed to see these flying saucers — sober individuals,
pillars of the community, police officers, commercial airplane
pilots, military personnel. And apart from some harumphs and
giggles, I couldn't find any counterarguments. How could all
these eyewitnesses be mistaken? What's more, the saucers had
been picked up on radar, and pictures had been taken of them.
You could see the pictures in newspapers and glossy magazines.
["Are We Being Visited? I." (2B, 2/20/93)] 6
There were even reports about crashed flying saucers and little
alien bodies in Air Fores freezers in the Southwest. And yet not
one adult I knew was preoccupied with UFOs. I couldn't figure
out why not. Instead they were worried about Communist China and
Soviet nuclear weapons. I wondered if they had their priorities
straight.
In college I began to learn a little about how science
works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the
standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something
is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human
thinking, how our biases can color our interpretation of the
evidence, how often belief systems widely held and supported by
the political, religious, and academic hierarchies turn out to be
not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong. I read a book
called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
written by Charles McKay in the middle nineteenth century
[examples of topics]; and another by Martin Gardner called Fads
and Fallacies in the Name of Science [more examples]. It dawned
on me that human fallibility being what it is, there might be
some other explanation for flying saucers.
I was interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life
long before I ever heard of flying saucers, and I've remained
fascinated long after my early enthusiasm for UFOs waned — as I
understood more about that remorseless taskmaster called the
scientific method. Everything hinges on the matter of evidence.
[1975, #29: "Unidentified Flying Objects"]
searchlights or headlights off clouds; reflections of sunlight,

from shiny surfaces; luminescent organisms (including onecase of
a firefly\lodged between two adjacent panes of glass in an
airplane cockpit window); optical mirages and/looming; lenticular
cloud formations* ball lightning; sun doa^j meteors, including
green fireballs; planets, especially^yenus; bright stars; and the
aurora borealis,
Radar detection ofunidentified flying objects has also
occurred occasionally. Many of these sightings have been
explained as radar reflections from temperature inversion layers
in the atmosphere an** other sources of radar "signals."
Considering the difficulties involved in tracking down
visual and radar sightings, it is remarkable that most of the
reported UFDs have been identified as naturally occurring — if
sometimes unusual — phenomena. It is of some interest that the
UFOs Which are unidentified do not fall into uniform categories
of/motion, color, and lighting, but rather run through roughly
)s. TIn
)ctober 1957, Sputnik I, the first Earth-orbiting artificial
r / satellite, was launched. Of 1,178 UFO sightings in that year,

70lAoccurred between October and December. The clear implication
is that Sputnik and its attendant publicity*was responsible) for
many UFO sightings. ^/"*
Earlier, in July 1952, a set of visual and radar
observations of unidentified flying objects over Washington, D.C.
r Broca II, draft 1, 8/12/92]
1975, #29: "unidentified Plying Objects," in Encylopedia

Americana (New York: Grolier); Americana Annual (New York:
Grolier); Bull. Atom. Sci. 23 /(6) (1967), 43; The Physics Reader
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Project Physics, 1968); Document 97-818,
House Committee on Science and Astronautics (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1968).
[The following/hate been transcribed from typescript labelled
"Text of article %n press in the Encyclopaedia [sp?] Americana,
1975."]
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT, a moving aerial or celestial

phenomenon^ detected visually or by radar but whose nature is not
immediately understood. Interest in unidentified flying objects
(UFOs/ stems from speculation that some of them are the products
of cavilizations beyond the Earth, and from the psychological
insights into contemporary human problems that this
SI—-*
interpretation provides.
tf
_àA* 'irTÍ^ UfO* *>"•■»
/Observations. -Unidontificd flying ebieeto have -fregn
/described variously as rapidly moving or hovering; disc-shaped,
cigar-shaped, or ball-shaped; moving silently or noisily; with a
fiery exhaust, or with no exhaust whatever; accompanied by
flashing lights, or uniformly glowing with a silvery cast. The
diversity of the observations suggestji that UFOs have no common
origin and that the use of such terms as UFOs or "flying saucers"
serves only to confuse the issue by grouping generically a
*rc*n «Ç»Ve *>«"*, *<"^ *«•£«//.'/#* or y " \
J
On so important a question, the evidence must be airtight. No

witness's say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. But
essentially all the UFO cases were mere anecdotes, something
asserted. There were hoaxes and faked photographes and the
suspicion that the field attracted rogues and charlatans.¿-And
"there were very many cases in which people honestly reported what
they saw, but what they saw turned out to be entirely natural.
Some reportad UFOs turned out to be unconventional aircraft,
conventional aircraft with unusual lighting patterns, luminescent
insects, planets seen under unusual atmospheric conditions,
I rocket boosters>reentering the atmosphere, and the like.^ One UFO
3s
seen by thousands ofpeople turned out to be a ¿i«
piece of
cardboard, some candles, and a thin plastic bag that dry cleaning
in — put together to make a rudimentary hot air balloon
<S ' Tnealleged evidence *ias^very thin.
Since then, I've been lucky enough to be involved in sending
spacecraft to other planets to look for life, and to be involved
in listening for possible radio signals sent our way by alien
civilizations on planets of distant stars. While we've had a few
tantalizing moments, we've not yet found any good evidence for
life beyond the Earth. But we're only at the very beginning of
the search. New, compelling data might emerge, for all we know,
tomorrow. I don't think anyone could be more interested than I
am if we're in fact being visited by aliens. It would save me so
much time and effort studying extraterrestrial intelligence
directly and nearby, rather than at best ~ if we're very lucky

— indirectly and at a great distance. (And we would at least be
quite sure there vas something to study.) My mind, I believe, is
open.
But in science, the standards of evidence must be high —
employing the same levels of skepticism as in buying a used car
or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their
television commercials. Skepticism, though, is discouraged in
our society. It's hardly taught at all in the schools. Our
politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old)
are awash in credulity. Also, it's no fun to tell nice, sincere,
although slightly distraught people that what they saw when I
wasn't there was some kind of psychological aberration or error.
The question is whether — after misapprehended natural
events and hoaxes and psychological aberrations are cleared away
— there is a residuum of reliably reported and extremely bizarre
cases, especially supported by physical evidence. Is there a
signal hiding in all the noise? In my view, no such signal has
been demonstrated. There are reliably reported cases which are
not exotic, and exotic cases which are not reliably reported. So
far as I know, there are no cases — despite well over a million
UFO reports since 1947 — in which something so strange that it
could only be an extraterrestrial spacecraft is reported so
reliably that misapprehension, hoax, or hallucination can be
reliably excluded.
Over the years I've continued to spend a little time on the

UFO problem. I've found that the going-in attitude of many
people is highly pre-determined. Some are convinced that
eyewitness testimony is reliable, that people do not lie, that
hallucinations on such a scale are impossible, and that therefore
there must be a long-standing, high-level government cover-up to
keep the truth from the rest of us. As government deceit and
conspiracies of silence have been exposed on so many other
matters, it's hard to argue that a cover-up on this strange
subject is impossible, that the government would never hide
important information from its citizens. A common argument on
why there should be a cover-up is to prevent panic or erosion of
confidence in the government.
I was a member of the U.S. Air Force committee that
investigated the Air Force's UFO study — called "Project
Bluebook," but earlier and revealingly called "Project Grudge."
We found the approach to be lackadaisical, careless, and
dismissive. In the middle 1960s, "Project Bluebook" was
headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. They
had state-of-the-art technology in file retrieval. You asked for
a given case and, somewhat like at the dry cleaner's today, reams
upon reams of files made their way past you, until the engine
stopped when the file you wanted was before you. But what was in
those files wasn't worth much. For example, senior citizens
report lights hovering over their small New Hampshire town for
["Are We Being Visited? I.* (2B, 2/20/93)} 10
more than an hour, and the case is explained as a wing of

strategic bombers from a nearby Air Force base on a training
exercise. Could the bombers take an hour to pass over the town?
No. Did the bombers pass over the town at the time the UFOs were
reported? No. Can you explain to us, Colonel, how strategic
bombers can be described as "hovering"? No. These slipshod
investigations played little scientific role, but they seemingly
demonstrated that the Air Force was on the job and that there was
nothing to UFO reports.
Of course, this doesn't preclude the possibility that there
was another, more serious, more scientific study of UFOs going on
elsewhere — perhaps headed by a Major General rather than a
Lieutenant Colonel. I think something like this is even likely,
not because I believe that we are being visited but because
hiding in the UFO phenomena are data of significant military
interest. Certainly if UFOs were as reported — very fast, very
maneuverable aircraft (or spacecraft) — there is a military
interest in finding out how they work. If the UFOs are built by
the Soviets, it is the Air Force's responsibility to protect us.
If the UFOs are built by extraterrestrials, we can copy the
technology and get a big step ahead of the Soviets. But even if
you believe that UFOs have nothing to do either with Soviets or
extraterrestrials, you have a good reason for following them
closely:
["Are We Being Visited? I." (2Bf 2/20/93)] 11
The early heyday of UFOs corresponds to the time when the

main delivery vehicle for nuclear weapons was being switched from
aircraft to missiles. An early and important problem had to do
with re-entry — the return through the bulk of the Earth's
atmosphere of a nuclear-armed nosecone. Observations of re-entry
could very well tell about U.S. progress in this vital strategic
technology, about inefficiencies in the design, and about how an
adversary might take defensive measures. Under such
circumstances, there very likely were cases in which military
personnel were told not to talk about what they had seen, or
where seemingly innocent data was suddenly classified top secret
or higher. Courageous Air Force officers and civilian scientists
thinking back on it years later might very well conclude that the
Air Force had a UFO cover-up.
Or consider spoofing. In the strategic confrontation
between the United States and the Soviet Union, the adequacy of
the defenses was an important issue. If you could find a
weakness, it might be the key to "victory" in an all-out war.
The way to test your adversary's air defenses is to fly an
aircraft into its airspace and see how long it takes for them to
notice you. In the 1950s and '60s, the United States had a
state-of-the-art radar defense system covering its West and East
Coasts, and especially its northern approaches (over which a
Soviet missile attack would most likely come). But there was a
soft underbelly ~ no significant Early Warning System for a
southern approach. This is of course information vital for a

potential adversary. It immediately suggests a spoof. A few of
the adversary's high-performance aircraft zoom out of the
Caribbean into U.S. airspace, penetrating, let us say, 500 miles
up the Mississippi River until the U.S. air defense radar locks
on. Then the aircraft hightail it out of there. There may be
combined visual and radar sightings and large numbers of
independent reports. What is reportad corresponds to no known
aircraft. The Air Force can truthfully state that none of its
aircraft was responsible. Even if they have been urging a
southern Early Warning System, the Air Force is unlikely to admit
that Soviet or Cuban aircraft got to St. Louis [check] before
anybody noticed.
Here again, we have every reason to expect a high-level
technical team investigating the incident, Air Force and civilian
observers told to keep their mouths shut, and not just the
appearance but the reality of suppression of the data. But
again, all of this need have nothing to do with alien spacecraft.
So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that some UFO reports
have been classified. But a conspiracy to keep knowledge of
alien abductions almost wholly secret for 45 years, with hundreds
if not thousands of government employees privy to it, is a
remarkable notion. Certainly secrets are routinely kept, even
ones of substantial general interest. But the point of such
secrecy is to protect the country and its citizens. Here,
[•'Are We Being Visited? I." (2B, 2/20/93)] 13
though, it's different. The alleged conspiracy is to keep from

us knowledge of a continuing alien assault on the human species.
If aliens really were abducting millions of us, it would be much
more than a matter of national security. It would impact the
security of all human beings in all countries. Given such
stakes, is it plausible that no one in nearly 200 nations would
blow the whistle and side with the humans rather than the aliens?
NASA after the end of the Cold War is flailing about, trying
to find missions that justify its existence — particularly a
good reason for humans in space. If the Earth were being visited
daily by hostile aliens, wouldn't NASA leap on this to augment
its funding? If an alien invasion were in progress, why would
the Air Force step back from manned spaceflight and launch all
its payloads on unmanned boosters? Consider the Strategic
Defense Initiative Organization, in charge of "Star Wars." It's
fallen on hard times, particularly its objective of basing
missile defenses in space. The inability of SDI to protect the
United States against a massive missile attack is manifest. But
wouldn't we want to have defenses in space if we were facing an
alien invasion? The entire post-Cold War posture of the military
and civilian space programs of the United States (and other
nations) speaks powerfully against the idea that there are aliens
among us — unless, of course, the news is also being kept from
those who plan the national defense.
On the other hand, there are those who dismiss the Idea of
alien visitation out of hand and with great passion, claiming
that it's unscientific even to consider the matter. A 1969
report by the National Academy of Sciences, while recognizing
that there are reports "not easily explained," concluded that
"the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of
extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings." I once
helped to organize a public debate at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science between
proponents and opponents of the proposition that some UFOs were
spaceships; whereupon a distinguished scientist, who in many
other matters I revered, threatened to sic the Vice President of
the United States on me if I persisted in this madness. --(The—
-debate was held and- published; the iosuos were a little bottor
¿rf^rrlfled, the üky did nuL Tall, and I did uuL hear from Cpiro H—
TftgTTëw. )~
It's curious that emotions can run so high on a matter about

which we know so little. After all, either hypothesis —
extraterrestrial invasion or an epidemic of hallucinations —
teaches us something we certainly ought to know about. Maybe the
reason for such strong feelings is that both alternatives have
extremely unpleasant implications.
[2C, 2/20/93]
Are We Being Visited? II.
The first alien abduction story in the modern genre began

with Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple — she a
social worker and he a Post Office employee. During a late-night
drive in 1961 through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Betty
spotted a bright star-like UFO that seemed to follow them.
Because Barney feared it might harm them, they left the main
highway for narrow mountain roads. They arrived home two hours
later than they had expected. The experience prompted Betty to
read a book about UFOs which claimed they were spaceships from
other worlds, and that their crews were little men who sometimes
abduct humans. Soon after, she had a repetitive nightmare in
which she and Barney were abducted and taken aboard the UFO.
Barney overheard her describing this dream to friends and
volunteer UFO investigators.
Several years later, Barney's psychiatrist referred him to a
Boston hypnotherapist, Benjamin Simon, M.D. Betty came to be
hypnotized as well. Under hypnosis they separately described a
memory of their trip home — of seeing a UFO, watching it land on
the highway, and being taken partly immobilized into the UFO,
where little humanoid creatures subjected them to unconventional
medical examinations. There are those now who believe that eggs
were taken from Betty's ovaries and sperm from Barney, although
["Are We Being Visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)]
that isn't part of the original story. The captain showed Betty
a map of interstellar space with the ship's routes marked.
Martin S. Kottmeyer has shown that many of the motifs in the
Hills' account can be found in a 1953 motion picture, "Invaders
from Mars." Barney's account of what the aliens looked like,
especially their enormous eyes, emerged in a hypnosis session
just twelve days after the airing of an episode of the television
series "The Outer Limits" in which such an alien was portrayed.
\Gauche Encounters; Badfilms and the UFO Mythos. by Martin S.
Kottmeyer.]
Although the case was celebrated, even the few scientists of
the time who identified some UFOs with alien spaceships were very
wary. The Hills' encounter was, for example, prominent by its
absence from the list of cases compiled by James E. McDonald, a
University of Arizona atmospheric physicist. McDonald's views
were based, he said, not on irrefutable evidence, but because all
*»*>j«/«>*^ s«<**t«l 4* 4/14 . ñ •! I
the alternative explanations were «area, e.^-*^ /*•» Cr*.¿f.* I, ix..
I was glad to have an opportunity to spend several hours
with Mr. and Mrs. Hill, and with Dr. Simon. There was no
mistaking the earnestness and sincerity of Betty and Barney, and
their mixed feelings about becoming public figures under such
bizarre circumstances. With the Hills' permission. Dr. Simon
played for me some of the audiotapes of their sessions under
hypnosis. By far my most striking impression was the absolute
terror in Barney's voice when he described — re-lived would be a
better word — the encounter. Simon, while a leading proponent

of the value of hypnosis, had not been caught up in the enormous
public interest in UFOs. He shared the royalties of John
Fuller's best-seller, Interrupted Journeyf on the Hills'
experience. If Simon had pronounced their account authentic, the
sales of the book might have gone through the roof and his own
financial reward been considerably augmented. But he didn't. He
rejected instantly the notion that they were lying, or that this
was a folie 4 deux — a shared delusion in which, generally, the
submissive partner goes along with the delusion of the dominant
partner. So what's left? The Hills, said their psychiatrist,
had experienced a species of "dream." Indeed, many modern
"abductees" express serious reservations about whether the
stories they are telling really happened.
In 1894 The International Census of Waking Hallucinations
was published in London. From that time to this, repeated
surveys have shown that 10 to 25 percent of ordinary, functioning
people have experienced, at least once in their lifetimes, a
vivid hallucination -- hearing a voice, usually, or seeing a form
when there's no one there. In some cases these are profound
religious experiences. (Probably a dozen times since their
deaths I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary,
conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my
name often during my life with them. I still miss them so much
that it doesn't seem strange to me that my brain will
occasionally retrieve a kind of lucid recollection of their

voices.)
Such hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people
under ordinary circumstances. But there are circumstances in
which they can be elicited: by a campfire at night, or under
great stress, or by prolonged fasting or sleeplessness or sensory
deprivation, or through hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin,
mescaline, hashish, or alcohol. (Delirium tremens, the dreaded
"DTs," is one well-known example.) There are also molecules,
like the benzodiazepines (valium, for example), that make
hallucinations go away. It is very likely that the normal human
body generates substances that cause hallucinations.
These hallucinations have a vivid and palpable reality.
Indeed, they are sought out in many cultures. Among the Native
Americans of the Western Plains, a young man's future occupation
was foreshadowed by the nature of the hallucination he
experienced; its meaning was discussed with great seriousness
among the elders and shamans of the tribe.
Hallucinations are common. If you have one, it doesn't mean
you're crazy. We would surely be missing something important
about our own nature if we refused to face up to the fact that
hallucinations are part of being human. But none of this makes
hallucinations real. Roughly 10 percent of Americans report
having seen one or more ghosts. This is more than the number who
allegedly remember being abducted, about the same as the number
[••Are We Being Visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)]
something like "Oh, that's not real; that's just your

imagination." Other families may be impatient about fantasising;
it makes running the household and adjudicating disputes at least
marginally more difficult. Many children can be discouraged from
fantasizing, and grow up thinking it's something shameful. A few
parents may not be very clear to the child about the distinction
between reality and fantasy, or may even enter into the fantasy.
Out of all these contending tendencies, some people grow up with
an intact ability to fantasize, and a history, extending well
into adulthood, of confabulation. Others conclude that anyone
who doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy is
"crazy."
Many abductees report having seen "aliens" in their
childhood — coming in through the window or from under the bed
or out of the closet. But children have reported similar stories
everywhere in the world -- with fairies, elves, goblins, and a
rich variety of imaginary "friends." Are we to imagine two
different groups of children — one who see imaginary earthly
beings and the other who see genuine extraterrestrials? Isn't it
more reasonable that both groups are seeing the same thing? Most
of us remember being frightened at the age of two or so by real-
seeming but wholly imaginary "monsters." X* we're capable of
conjuring up monsters in childhood^**q^-H?or___c^xQéVê3£pJrutü—
^pé^ô1î\6^--41^H(^â^t--be\-s»^ why shouldn't some of us, at least on
occasion, be able to imagine similar things as adults?
* * *
There's a common, although insufficiently well-known,

psychological syndrome very much like alien abduction: Many
people have experienced sleep paralysis. On falling asleep or
when waking up — just for a few seconds, or maybe for longer
periods — you seem to be paralyzed and acutely anxious. You may
feel a weight on your chest, your heartbeat is quick, your
breathing labored. You may experience auditory or visual
hallucinations — of people, demons, ghosts, animals, or birds.
In the right setting, the experience can have "the full force and
impact of reality," according to Robert Baker, a psychologist at
the University of Kentucky. Sometimes there's a marked sexual
component to the hallucination.
Baker has foroafully argued that these common sleep
disturbances are behind many if not most of the alien abduction
accounts. Some "abductees" remember the experience without
hypnosis; most do not. But hypnosis is an unreliable way to
refresh memory (and often elicits false recollections). Many
courts have banned its use in criminal investigation. So the
fact that people relate alien abduction stories when hypnotized
carries little weight. Indeed, there's a danger that subjects
are — at least on some matters ~ so eager to please the
hypnotist that they sometimes respond to subtle cues of which the
["Are We Being Visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)] 8
hypnotist may be unaware. (Baker and others suggest that some

abduction claims are also made by fantasy-prone individuals or
hoaxers seeking fame and fortune. There is also the
insufficiently examined possibility that these accounts are
disguised memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse.)
Even if no known hallucinations were to fit the alien
abduction pattern, it is certain that humans commonly
hallucinate. But there's considerable doubt about whether
extraterrestrials exist and frequently visit our planet. We may
argue about details, but the one category of explanation seems
much better supported than the other. The main reservation you
might then have is: Why do so many people report this particular
set of hallucinations? Why little gray beings, and flying
saucers, and sexual molestation?
Demons, taught the early Church Fathers, come down from
Heaven and have unlawful sexual congress with women. No less a
figure than St. Augustine believed that witches were the
offspring of these forbidden unions. In his famous Bull of 1484,
Pope Innocent VTII declared, "It has come to Our ears that
members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil
angels, incubi, and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by
their incantations, charms, and conjurations, they suffocate,
extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women. . ."as well
as cause sundry other calamities. [Annemarie de Waal Malefijt,
Religion and Culture; An Introduction £fi Anthropology of
["Are We Being visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)]
Religion (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989)

(originally published in 1968 by Macmillan), pp. 286 ff.] With
this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture,
and execution of countless "witches" all over Europe. Despite
the evenhanded "members of both sexes" in the language of the
Bull, as it turned out it was almost entirely women who were so
persecuted. Their differences with the Catholic Church
notwithstanding, many leading Protestant theologians of the
following centuries had nearly identical views.
In his Bull, Innocent commended "Our dear sons Henry Kramer
and James Sprenger," who "have been by Letters Apostolic
delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical [dejpravities" —
because if "the abominations and enormities in question remain
unpunished," the souls of many may be in peril of eternal
damnation. It was all being done for their own good.
Innocent appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a
comprehensive analysis, using the full academic armory of the
late fifteenth century. With exhaustive citations of Scripture
and ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus
Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches" — aptly described as one of
the most terrifying documents in human history. What it comes
down to, pretty much, is that if you're accused of witchcraft,
you're guilty. There are no rights of the accused. There is no
opportunity to confront your accusers. No one seems to have even
considered the proposition that accusations can be made for
["Are We Being Visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)} 10
impious purposes ~ jealousy, say, or revenge, or misogyny. The

more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it
was to maintain that the whole business was mainly fantasy. And
the Bible counseled, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
Legions of women were burnt alive.
In the Malleus. Kramer and Sprenger declared that
"devils. . . busy themselves by interfering with the process of
normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and
themselves transferring it." The offspring of these demonic
unions are also, when they grow up, visited by devils — although
not all witches are created in this way. And witches were well-
known to fly through the air. There is no spaceship, but most of
the essential elements of the alien abduction story are here. On
this matter, in this age, there were almost no skeptics.
Everyone believed.
Accounts with similar elements occur in cultures around the
world. In Genesis we hear of angels who are sexually attracted
to "the daughters of men." In ancient Greece and Rome, there are
innumerable stories about gods appearing to women as bulls or
swans or showers of gold and impregnating them. There were
skeptics in those days too, like Cassius whose position is
reported by Plutarch in his Brutus; "Our senses, being
credulous, and therefore easily abused. . . are induced to
imagine they see and conjecture that which in truth they do not."
But hardly anyone took them seriously. St. Teresa of Avila
["Are We Being Visited? II.» (2C, 2/10/93)] 11
reported a vivid sexual encounter with an angel, as did many

other women who were sanctified by the Catholic Church.
In 1645 a Cornish teen-ager, Anne Jeffries, was found
groggy, crumpled on the floor. Much later, she recalled being
attacked by half-a-dozen little men, carried paralyzed to a
castle in the air, seduced, and returned home. She called the
little men fairies. They returned to torment her. The next year
she was arrested for witchcraft [Katherine Briggs, An
Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, 1976)]. Fairies traditionally
have magical powers, and can cause paralysis by the merest touch.
The ordinary passage of time is slowed in fairyland. Fairies are
somehow reproductively impaired, so they have sex with humans and
carry off babies from their cradles — sometimes leaving a fairy
substitute, a "changling." If Anne Jeffries had known about
aliens rather than fairies, and UFOs rather than castles in the
air, would her story have been distinguishable from the one
"abductees" tell?
In his 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An
Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions.
David Hufford describes an executive, a university-educated man
in his mid-thirties, who recalls a summer he spent as a teenager
in his aunt's house. One night, after seeing mysterious lights
in the harbor, he fell asleep. But from his bed he witnessed a
white and glowing figure climbing the stairs, entering his room,
and saying — not especially ominously — "That is the linoleum."
Sometimes the figure was an old woman; sometimes it changed into

an elephant. Sometimes he was sure he was dreaming; other times
he was sure he was awake. Pressed down into his bed, he was
immobilised and unable to move or cry out. His heart was
pounding. He was short of breath. Something similar happened on
many consecutive nights. This experience occurred before alien
abductions were widely described. If the executive had known
about alien abductions, would his old woman have had a larger
head and bigger eyes?
The folklorist Thomas E. Builard argues that "abduction
reports sound like rewrites of older supernatural encounter
traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of divine
beings." He concludes: "Science may have evicted ghosts and
witches from our beliefs, but it just as quickly filled the
vacancy with aliens having the same functions. Only the
extraterrestrial outer trappings are new. All the fear and the
psychological dramas for dealing with it seem simply to have
found their way home again, where it is business as usual in the
legend realm where things go bump in the night" [(J. Amer.
Folklore 102 (1989), pp. 147-170).]
Is it possible that people in all times and places
occasionally experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often
with sexual content — with the details filled in by the
prevailing cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist? When
everyone knows that gods regularly come down to Earth, we
["Are We Being Visitad? II." (2C, 2/20/93)] 13
hallucinate gods; when everyone knows about demons, it's incubi

and succubi; when fairies ara widely believed, we see fairies;
and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that alien
beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery
tends. Snatches of song or foreign languages, images, and
stories that we witnessed in our childhood can be accurately
recalled decades later without any conscious memory of the
source. In our everyday life, we effortlessly incorporate
cultural motifs and norms and make them our own.
Today aliens are the subject of innumerable science fiction
stories and novels (including one of my own). UFOs are a regular
feature of weekly newspapers dedicated to falsification and
mystification. One of the highest-grossing motion pictures of
all time is about aliens very like those described by abductees.
Alien abduction stories were comparatively rare until 1975, when
a credulous network dramatization of the Hills case was aired;
another leap into public prominence occurred after 1987, when a
purported first-hand account with a haunting cover painting of an
"alien" became a best-seller. It is striking how similar many of
the abduction accounts are now, and how little we hear lately
about incubi and fairies. (Where have they all gone?) But it
might not be altogether surprising that in our time and society,
short, gray aliens with breeding programs on their minds are what
Americans mainly reach for when they must describe these
hallucinations.
["Are We Being Visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)) 14
In other countries, bird-headed, insect-headed, robot, and

blond and blue-eyed aliens are reported. This will probably
decline as the American short gray motif becomes better
publicized Worldwide. nuw>n»Ty fcH»y» WM* nïri Vînq fiiffprp-nces
tag cpininn lirHi n TT fl, nnrl nn"rp"in ntiTi?nts of alien
t*Uductionsï*
Long before the terms "flying saucer" or "UFOs" were
invented, science fiction was replete with "little green men" and
"bug-eyed monsters." Somehow little aliens with big heads (and
eyes) have been with us for a long time, going back to the
fictional Martians of H. 6. Wells. The typical reported modern
extraterrestrial is small, with disproportionately large head and
eyes, undeveloped facial features, no eyebrows or genitals, and
smooth gray skin. It looks to me eerily like a fetus in roughly
the twelfth week of pregnancy. Why so many of us might be
obsessing on fetuses, and imagining them attacking us, is an
interesting question.
Of course, as enthusiasts for extraterrestrial visitations
are quick to remind me, there's another interpretation of these
historical circumstances: Perhaps, they say, aliens have always
been visiting us, poking at us, stealing our sperms and eggs,
impregnating us. In earlier times we understood them to be gods,
demons, or fairies; only now do we realize that it's aliens
who've been diddling us all these millennia. But then why are
there virtually no reports of flying saucers before 1947?
The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus

has found that people can easily be made to believe they saw
something they didn't. In a typical experiment, subjects will
view a fil» of a car accident. When questioned about what they
saw, they're casually given false information. For example, a
stop sign is off-handedly referred to when there wasn't one in
the film. Many subjects then dutifully recall seeing a stop
sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently disagree,
stressing how clearly they remember the sign. The greater the
time lag between viewing the film and being given the false
information, the more people let their memories be tampered with.
There is considerable evidence that vivid but wholly false
recollections can be induced by a few cues and questions,
especially in the therapeutic setting. These facts suggest that
on alien abduction matters — where interviews typically occur
years after the alleged event — therapists must be very careful
that they do not accidentally implant the stories they elicit and
recount.
"There's nothing in my background that prepared me" for the
alien abduction story, says one psychiatrist who takes it at face
value. "It's completely persuasive because of the emotional
power of these experiences." But have the hypnotists and
psychotherapists working with "abductees" made conscientious
attempts to steep themselves in the body of knowledge on human
hallucinations and perceptual malfunctions? Why do they believe
these witnesses but not those who report, with comparable

conviction, encounters with gods, demons, angels, and fairies?
Are all deeply felt stories true?
How can further progress be made? Those treating abductees
might explain to their patients that hallucinations are normal.
They might bear in mind that no patient can be wholly
uncontaminated by the aliens in popular culture. They might take
scrupulous care not subtly to lead the witness.
I'm surprised that there are psychiatrists and others with
at least some scientific training, who know the imperfections of
the human mind, but who dismiss the idea that these accounts are
some species of hallucination. I'm even more surprised by claims
that the alien abduction story is a challenge to our grip on
reality, or constitutes support for mysticism. Even if we take
the cases at face value, their remarkable aspects — slithering
through walls and so on — would be a tribute to advanced alien
technology, not a vindication of witchcraft.
No one would be happier than I would if we had real evidence
of extraterrestrial life. But the issue comes down to the
quality of the evidence. Proponents of alien abductions do not
ask us to believe on faith, but rather on the strength of their
evidence. Surely it is our duty to examine the purported
evidence closely and skeptically. N_o anecdotal claim — no
matter how sincere, no matter how deeply felt, no matter how
exemplary the lives of the attesting citizens — carries much
weight on so important a question. As for the older UFO cases,

anecdotal accounts are subject to irreducible error. This is not
a criticism of those who claim abductions or of those who
interrogate them. It is merely a statement of human fallibility.
Where is the physical evidence? Some abductees allege that
aliens stole fetuses from their wombs. This is something that
would surely cause a stir among gynecologists, midwives,
obstetrical nurses — especially in an age of heightened feminist
awareness. But not a single medical record has been produced
substantiating such claims.
Some abductees say that tiny metallic implants were inserted
into their bodies -- high up their nostrils, for example. But no
such implants have been confirmed by physicists as of unearthly
manufacture. There are no metals from the transuranic "island of
stability," where many physicists think there might be a new
family of chemical elements unknown on Earth. There are no
components made of unusual isotopes. There is no hint of cunning
machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has filched
a page from the captain's logbook, or a strange examining
instrument, or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of
the ship, or come back with detailed scientific information not
hitherto known on Earth. These failures surely tell us
something.
For 45 years we've been told by proponents of the
extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical evidence -- not
disturbed soil but real alien technology — vas in hand. The

analysis would be released momentarily. It's 45 years later and
we're still waiting. Where are the articles published in the
refereed scientific literature, in metallurgical journals, in
publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers, in Science or Nature? Such a discovery would be
momentous. If there were real artifacts, physicists and chemists
would be fighting for the privilege of discovering that there are
aliens among us — who use, say, wholly unknown alloys, or
materials of extraordinary tensile strength or ductility or
conductivity. The practical implications of such a discovery —
never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion — would be
immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for.
Their absence must tell us something. Occasionally there's a
mysterious appearance of alleged classified documents from
decades ago attesting to crashed saucers and small aliens and
cver\ C HM4.cn /«»* s*-»J
government conspiracy. But we never hear aboutârtifacts
smuggled out of secret warehouses. Why not? The simplest
explanation is that they don't exist. Keeping an open mind is a
good thing — but, as the space engineer James Oberg has said,
not so open that your brains fall out. Not all claims have equal
merit. But of course we should be open to good new evidence.
If indeed the bulk of the alien abduction accounts are
really about hallucinations, don't we have before us a matter of
supreme importance — touching on our limitations, the ease with
which we may be misled, the fashioning of our beliefs, and

perhaps even the origins of our religions? There is genuine
scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions — but it is, I
think, of a distinctly terrestrial nature.
* * *
[Box:]
Aliens and the Big Bang
It is my practice to send early drafts of my articles to

experts in the field — both those who might agree with me and
those who night not. I always find that the piece is improved as
a result. Errors of fact are corrected, implications that I've
missed are drawn, better anecdotes are suggested, and
infelicities of style are corrected. For these two chapters on
alien abductions, it seemed to me that there are no real experts,
but I sent copies to about a dozen people who had written on this
contentious subject.
One of the most interesting responses was from an author and
therapist who has worked with abductees, and argued fervently
that we really are being visited by honest-to-goodness
extraterrestrials. There is not a word of substantive criticism
in his letter — nothing about how I described the abduction
experience and nothing about how I attempted to explain it. He
[Box at end of "Are We Being Visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)] 20
complains that I have "no idea of the extent of the evidence, the
weight of the literature, or the range and thoroughness of the
work in the field." He compares my writing about alien abduction
to his writing about the Big Bang. He has no credentials in
cosmology, he suggests, perhaps never even having seriously
studied the subject, and therefore his opinions on the matter are
worthless. He invites me to draw the same conclusion about my
opinions on alien abduction.
But how, I wondered, would he proceed if he were seriously
about to write an article on the Big Bang? Surely it would be
insufficient to discuss his own emotional predispositions,
whether he finds the theory congenial or upsetting, and the like.
He would have to discuss the evidence. He would have to describe
the spectroscopic data supporting a mutual recession of the
galaxies, the black body microwave background radiation, and the
ratio of hydrogen to helium in interstellar space. These are the
standard pieces of evidence for Big Bang cosmology, and this
evidence, separately and collectively, is the reason that the
theory is well-accepted by the tumultuous and argumentative
community of cosmologists.
If you wished to be a skeptic on the subject, you would
perhaps argue that there is another explanation for the
background radiation, or that some terrible error has been made
in the ground-based and space-borne measurements of the
background radiation. You would have to take account of the fact
[Box at end of "Are We Being Visitad? II." (2Cf 2/20/93)] 21
that hundreds of scientists in a dozen nations have carried out

independent studies, all of which show the same unmistakable
signature of the now wan remnant of the great fireball that began
the Universe, or at least its present incarnation. Any skeptic
might devise an independent experiment to see if she too reaches
the same conclusion. But she could not dismiss the evidence as
inappropriately anecdotal. A dedicated skeptic can go to the
laboratories and observe the meter readings. Not only are all
the measurements consistent with a certain so-called "black body
curve" quantitatively determining how intense the radio waves are
at each frequency, but they all agree within the probable error
about what the present temperature of the background radiation is
(about 2.7* above absolute zero). Everything depends on the
quality of the evidence.
The situation is very different for alien abductions. There
are no meter readings. There are only stories. The skeptic
cannot go out and examine the aliens, but is restricted to
listening to accounts from a population that is contaminated by
books, magazines, and television programs telling and retelling
the same story. Despite this, by no means are all the accounts
of aliens similar. There is nothing like one curve specified by
a single temperature on which all the observations converge. The
evidence for the mutual recession of the galaxies, the black body
background radiation, and the abundance of helium are not just
vaguely consistent with a Big Bang, but quantitatively, reliably,
[Box at end of "Are We Being Visited? II." (2C, 2/20/93)] 22
£r
and repeatedly consistent with it.
This does not mean that there aren't a few competent
astronomers who are skeptical about Big Bang cosmology. It is
one of the strengths of science that every issue is open to
debate. But the scientific skeptics of Big Bang cosmology
understand that they must provide alternative explanations of the
present quantitative evidence for the Big Bang, and show that
these alternative explanations make fewer demands on what we do
not know, are more parsimonious with their assumptions, more
consistent with the rest of our knowledge. So far, no such
alternative explanation has been forthcoming. The situation is
very different in the alien abduction controversy.
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JOM¿'IC
• In the /¡£ible it talks about terrestrial and celestial

bodies. This is not to say that God is out for sexual abuse on
people or that were crazy.
Q£? • Sagan refuses to take seriously the witnesses' reports of
anything that twentieth-century science can't explain.
y— -^• When alleged scientists conspire to censor and intimidate
those who endeavor to offer new insightful hypotheses on
conventional theories. . . they no longer should be considered
scientists, but merely the insecure, self-serving impostors that
they apparently are. . . In the same token, must we also still
suppose that J. Edgar Hoover was a fine FBI director, rather than
the homosexual tool of organized crime he was?
•)• My friend Frankie [ Franky?} wants me to bring back an
'ashtray or a matchbook, but I think these visitors are probably
much too intelligent to smoke.
¿&o) • Some of these beams -jbeingslgj are capable of intercepting
the spiritual body when it is traveling.
• How many human females who had the misfortune of being
® raped had the foresight to take from their attacker an ID card, a
picture of the rapist, or anything else which could be used as
evidence as to an alleged rape?
(£2) • The aliens can stay a step or two ahead of the thinking of
scientists, and know how to leave insufficient clues behind that
would satisfy the Sagan types, until society is better prepared
[3-23-93.atl]
mentally to face up to it all. . . Perhaps you share the view

that what's going on with respect to UFOs and aliens, if deemed
real, would be too traumatic to think about. However. . .
they've shown themselves until back some 5,000-15,000 years or
more ago when they were here for extended periods, spawning the
god/goddess mythology of all cultures. The bottom line is that
in all that time they haven't taken over Earth; they haven't
subjected us or wiped us out.
<34¡) • I have at least 20 reasons why Carl Sagan's and other
evolutionist's ideas about evolution are not scientific. Their
assumptions are mere hallucinations, not one bit better than
hallucinations regarding the existence of extraterrestrial
aliens.
y The explosion that people saw was hydrogen fuel from a
star cruiser, the landing sight was to be Northern
California. . . The people on that star cruiser looked like Mr.
Spock from the Star Trek TV series.
m/ • Your conclusion that large numbers of people in this
country, perhaps as many as five million, are all victims of an
identical mass hallucination is asinine.
Q_^y * If there is no reason to take the matter of alien
visitation seriously, why is it the most highly classified
subject in the U.S. government?
\^_J • Science has become the "magic that works. " The UFOlogists
are heretics to be excommunicated or burned at the stake.
[3-23-93.atl]
• I hope that I never feel so superior that I cannot

acknowledge that Creation is not limited to myself, but
encompasses the Universe and all its entities.
0 • I can't believe you would publish Carl Sagan's UFO crap,

which is just more of what our government want the public to
believe.
0 • I wonder how some of our fellow animals may describe their

encounters with us. They see a large hovering object making a
terrible noise above them. They begin to run and feel a sharp
pain in their side. Suddenly they fall to the ground. . .
Several man-creatures approach them carrying strange looking
instruments. They examine your sexual organs and teeth. They
place a net under you and then let it take you in the air with a
strange device. After all the examinations, they then clamp a
strange metal object to your ear. Then, just as suddenly as they
had appeared, they are gone. Eventually, muscle control returns,
and the poor disoriented creature staggers off into the forest,
not knowing that what just transpired was a nightmare or a
reality.
(U>) • If I were a betting man, I would give you odds that your
mailbox will overflow with stories such as I just related. I
suspect that the psychic brings forth these demons and angels,
lights and circles as a part of our development. They are part
of our nature.
[3-23-93.atl]
\*6/ • Sagan is now the top authority and debunker of UFO for the
U.S. gov't.
(5y • This is a grotesquely challenging arena. . . I studied
UFOs for over 20 years. Finally I became quite disenchanted by
the cult and the cult fringe groups.
\JoJ • I am a 47-year-old grandmother who has been the victim of
this phenomena since early childhood. I do not — nor have I
ever — accepted it at face value. I do not — nor have I ever
— claimed to understand what it is. . . I would gladly accept a
diagnosis of schizophrenia, or some other understood pathology,
in exchange for this unknown. . . The lack of physical evidence
is, I fully agree, most frustrating for both victims and
researchers. Unfortunately, the retrieval of such evidence is
made extremely difficult by the manner in which the victims are
abducted. Often I am removed either in my nightgown (which is
later removed) or already naked. This condition makes it quite
impossible to hide a camera. . . There is another form of
physical evidence you neglected to mention in your article; this
being bodily marks, scars, and physical abnormalities still
unexplained by the medical community. I have awakened with deep
gashes, puncture wounds, scooped out tissue, eye damage, bleeding
from the nose and ears, burns, and finger marks and bruises which
persist for days after the event. I have had all of these
examined by qualified physicians but none have been
satisfactorily explained. I am not into self-mutilâtion; these
[3-23-93.atl]
are not stigmata. . . Please be aware that the majority of

abductees claim to have had no interest in UFOs previously (I am
one), have no history of childhood abuses (I am one), have no
désira for publicity or notoriety (I am one), and, in fact, have
gone to great lengths to avoid acknowledging any involvement
whatsoever, assuming he or she is experiencing a nervous
breakdown or other psychological disorder (I am one). Agreed,
there are many self-proclaimed abductees (and contactées) who
seek out publicity for monetary gain or to satisfy a need for
attention. I would be the last to deny these people exist. What
I do deny is that ALL abductees are imagining or falsifying these
events to satisfy their own personal agendas.
• I was sexually abused as a child. In my recovery I have
<§>
drawn many "space being" |correctly transcribod?-j and have felt
many times I was being overpowered, held down, and the sensation
of having left my body to float around the room. None of the
abductee accounts really come as a surprise to someone who has
dealt with childhood sexual abuse issues. . . Believe me, I
would much rather have blamed my abuse on a space alien than have
to face the truth about what happened to me with the adults I was
supposed to be able to trust. It's been driving me crazy to hear
some of my friends speak of their memories that imply they have
been abducted by aliens. . . I keep saying to them that this is
the ultimate victim role in which we as adults have no power when
these little gray men come to us in our sleep! This is not real.
[3-23-93.atl]
The ultimate victim role is the one between an abusive parant and
the victimized child.
i$) • Hynosis prepares the mind for the invasion of demons,
devils, and little gray men. God wants us to be clothed and in
our right minds. . . Anything your "little gray men" can do,
Christ can do better1
V*W• I am having communication with an alien being. This
communication started early in 1992. What else can I say?
\Jj • UFOs don't exist. I think that requires an eternal energy
source, and this doesn't exist. . . I have spoken with Jesus.
/33J • Homo sapiens EîdeTjj«ned^JiTn2rJîneti?»] was genetically
fashioned, created initially to be substitute laborers and
domestics for the SKY-LORDS (DINGIRS/ELOHIM/ANUNNAKI).
(9~7j• The answer to these aliens from outer-space is simple. It
comes from man. Man using drugs on people. In mental
institutions all over the country, there are people who have no
control over their emotions and behavior. To control these
people, they are given a variety of antipsychotic drugs. . . If
you have been drugged often. . . you will begin to have what is
called "bleedthroughs." This will be flash images popping into
your mind of strange-looking people coming up to your face. This
will begin your search for the answer of what the aliens were
doing to you. You will be one of the thousands of UFO abductees.
People will call you crazy. The reason for the strange creatures
you are seeing is because Thorazine distorts the vision of your
t3-23-93.atl]
subconscious mind. . . The writer was laughed at, ridiculed, had

his life threatened [because of presenting these ideas].
• You, sir, are in a position to do one of two things: Know
about the abductions and be covering them up, or feel that
because you have not been abducted (perhaps they are not
interested in you) they do not occur.
• You, a great scientist who is—praised by—•
on the Parade magazine is very destructive, and it enjoys scaring

society, I beg you to think more openly because our intelligent
beings from outer spaces do exist and they are our creators. . .
I too was an abductee. To be honest, these dear beings have done
me more good than bad. They have saved my life. . . The trouble
with Earth beings is that they want proof, proof, and proof1
© • A treason suit [was filed] against the President and

Congress of the United States over a treaty made with aliens in
the early '40s, who had later shown themselves to be hostile. . .
The treaty agreed to protect the secrecy of the aliens in return
for some of their technology.
O • [Several readers wrote to say that aliens were devils sent

by Satan, who is able to cloud our minds. One proposes that the
Satanic purpose is to make us worried about an alien invasion, so
that when Jesus and his angels appear over Jerusalem we will be
frightened rather than glad.] I do hope you will not dismiss me,
[she writes,] as another religious crackpot. I am quite normal
3/30/93
-A rale. Blue Dtrt-
There-'w^re manyahoughtful and^nstmctiyj^sponseMlí^lyeceiyîo^S¿_a^

^lers were^not. IHereviS\a sap^Hnle fromthei
"In 1977 an heavenly being spoke to me about an injury to my head that happened
&) in 1968"
(yl*t A
O A letter from a mañ/who haThad 24 separate encounters with "a silent hovering
saucer-shaped vehicle" andV'Huuje 'experienced an ongoing development and amplification
of such mental functions as clairvoyance, telepathy, and the challenging of universal life
energy for the purpose of healing"
[3-23-93.atl]
and well-known in my own little community.

^Çm • Over the years I have seen and talked to "ghosts," been
visited (though not yet abducted) by aliens, seen 3-dimensional
heads floating by my bed, heard knocks on ay door. . . These
experiences seemed as real as life. I have never thought of
these experiences as anything more than what they certainly are:
my mind playing tricks on itself. [From a letter received by The
Skeptical Inquirer; reference Kendrick Fraser.]
/?■
[4-3-93.atp]
In "The Triumph of Voyager." here is a new first sentence

for the first paragraph:
They opened the Solar System for the human species,
trailblazing a path for our descendants. [And then pick up
"Their names were Voyager 1 and Voyager ¿. . ."]
[2A, 2/20/93]
The Triumph of Voyager
• •* J..-X Ç.'r<+?/
"R< sounds a
little out twentieth century —
something you1» 'for the end of the twenty-
second century, now^/Robots don't seem to play much
of a role in our lives it. Certainly there are
manufacturing robots ai ita processing systems that have
increased efficiei people out of work. But we don't
much think at i, robots with names and
persone are such robots, though, and
it in this chapter to talk about a ramous robot couple.
Their names are Voyager X and Voyager ¿. They were launched
in August and September 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida bound
for the planets and the stars. In the next dozen years, they
provided our first detailed, close-up information about many new
worlds — some of them previously known only as fuzzy disks in
the eyepieces of ground-based telescopes, some merely as points
of light, and many entirely unknown before the Voyagers
discovered them. Before Voyager, we were almost wholly ignorant
about most of the planetary part of the Solar System.
They will-chaiiuë IilüLuiy, IL" m¿eiua to me,—baoaucenwhen all
is said and done, they will have taught us about the uniqueness
and fragility of our world, about the variety of other worlds, «•?
about the origin and fate of the Solar System,-■ and because they
were the ships that first explored some of the homelands of our
•
["The Triumph of Vovager" (2A, 2/20/93)]
remote descendants. These two spacecraft have opened most of the

Solar System — both in extent and in mass — to the human
species.
United States launch vehicles are not powerful enough to get
a spacecraft this quickly to the outermost Solar System by rocket
propulsion alone. So Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare lining-
up of the planets: A close fly-by of Jupiter accelerated it on
to Saturn, Saturn on to Uranus, Uranus on to Neptune, and Neptune
on to the stars. (The last opportunity for such a game of
celestial billiards presented itself during the Presidency of
Thomas Jefferson. But we were then only at the horseback, canoe,
and sailing ship stage of exploration.)
Since adequate funds were unavailable, NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) only could afford to build a spacecraft that
would work reliably as far as Saturn. Beyond that, all bets were
off. But because of the brilliance of the engineering design —
and the fact that the JPL engineers who told the spacecraft what
to do got smarter faster than the spacecraft got dumb — both
Voyagers went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and are still
radioing data back from deep interplanetary space.
We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than
the ships that brought them, or the shipwrights. It has always
been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages
of Columbus do not tell us much about the builders of the Niña,
Pinta, and Santa Maria, or even about the principle of the
["The Triumph of Voyager" (2A, 2/20/93)]
caravel. These spacecraft, their designers, builders,

navigators, and controllers are examples of what science and
engineering, set free for well-defined peaceful purposes, can
accomplish. Those scientists and engineers are role models for
an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness.
They should be on our stamps.
At each of the four giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune -- Voyager studied the planet, its rings, and
its moons. At Jupiter, in 1979, Voyagers 1 and 2 braved a dose
of trapped charged particles 1,000 times what it takes to kill a
human being; and in all that radiation discovered the rings of
the largest planet, the first active volcanos outside Earth, and
a possible underground ocean on an airless world — among a few
hundred other major findings. At Saturn, in 1980 and 1981, the
two spacecraft survived a pummeling by tiny ice particles as they
plummeted through previously unknown rings/, and discovered not a
few, but thousands of Safeurnian rings^, icy moons recently melted
through unknown causes, and a large world with an apparent ocean
of liquid hydrocarbons surmounted by clouds of organic matter.
On January 25, 1986, Voyager 2. entered the Uranus system and
reported a procession of wonders. The encounter lasted only a
few hours, but the data faithfully relayed back to Earth have
revolutionized our knowledge of the aquamarine planet, its more
than 15 moons, its pitch black rings, and its belt of trapped
high-energy charged particles. At Neptune on [date], Voyager 2.
["The Triumph of Vovaaer" (2A, 2/20/93)]
swept through the Neptune system and observed in the dim sunlight
kaleidoscopic cloud patterns and a moon with a bizarre surface
and plumes of fine organic particles swept up by the (very) thin
air. These spacecraft have returned four trillion bits of
information to Earth, the equivalent of about 100,000
encyclopedia volumes. Ci described the Vovaaer encounter with the
Jupiter system in Cosmos. I'll try to say a little about the
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune encounters below. J
Because we are stuck on Earth, we are forced to peer at
distant worlds through an ocean of distorting air. It is easy to
see why our spacecraft have revolutionized the study of the Solar
System: We ascend to the stark clarity of the vacuum of space,
and there approach our objectives, flying past them or orbiting
them or landing on their surfaces. These worlds will be —
unless we are so foolish as to destroy ourselves first — as
familiar to our descendants as the neighboring states are to
those who live on Earth today.
Voyager and its brethren are prodigies of human
inventiveness. Just before Voyager 2, was to encounter the Uranus
system, the mission design had scheduled a final course
correction, a short firing of the on-board propulsion system to
position Voyager correctly as it flew among the moving moons.
But the course correction proved unnecessary. The spacecraft was
already within 200 kilometers of its designed trajectory after a
voyage along an arcing path five billion kilometers long. This
["The Triumph of Voyager" (2A, 2/20/93))
is roughly the equivalent of throwing a pin through the eye of a

needle 50 kilometers away, or firing your target pistol in New
York and hitting the bull's eye in Dallas.
Lodes of planetary treasure were transmitted back to Earth
by the radio antenna aboard Voyager; but Earth is so far away
that by the time the signal was gathered in by radio telescopes
on our planet, the received power was only 10 watts (fifteen
zeros after the decimal point). This weak signal is to the power
emitted by an ordinary reading lamp as the size of an atom is to
the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
The spacecraft were designed, assembled, and operated by
JPL. The mission was conceived during the late 1960s, first
funded in 1972, but was not approved in its final form (including
encounters with Uranus and Neptune) until after the 1979 Jupiter
flyby. The two spacecraft were launched by a nonreusable
Titan/Centaur booster configuration. Weighing about a ton, a
Voyager would fill a good-sized living room. Each spacecraft
draws about 400 watts of power — considerably less than an
average American home — from a generator that converts
radioactive plutonium into electricity. (If it had to rely on
solar energy, the power available would decline quickly as the
ship ventured farther and farther from the Sun. If not for
nuclear power, Voyager would have returned no data at all from
the outer Solar System, except perhaps for Jupiter.)
["The Triumph of Voyager1» (2A, 2/20/93)]
The instrument that measures interplanetary magnetic fields

is so sensitive that the flow of electricity through the innards
of the spacecraft would generate spurious signals. As a result,
this instrument is placed at the end of a long boom stretching
out from the spacecraft. With other projections, it gives
Voyager a slightly porcupine appearance. Two cameras, infrared
and ultraviolet spectrometers, and an instrument called the
photopolarimeter are on a scan platform; the platform swivels so
these instruments can point toward a target world. The
spacecraft antenna must know where Earth is if the transmitted
data are to be received back home. The spacecraft also needs to
know where the Sun is and at least one bright star, so it can
orient itself in three dimensions and point properly toward any
passing world. It does no good to be able to return pictures
over billions of miles if you can't point the camera.
Each spacecraft cost about as much as a single modern
strategic bomber. But unlike bombers, Voyager cannot, once
launched, be returned to the hangar for repairs. As a result,
the spacecraft's computers and electronics are designed
redundantly. When Voyager finds itself in trouble, the computers
use branched contingency tree logic to work out the appropriate
course of action. If that doesn't work, the robot radios home
for help.
As the spacecraft journeys increasingly far from Earth, the
round-trip light (and radio) travel time also increases,
["The Triumph of Vovaaer" (2A, 2/20/93)]
approaching twelve hours by the tine Voyager is at the distance

of Neptune. Thus, in case of emergency, the spacecraft needs to
know how to put itself in a safe standby mode while awaiting
instructions from Earth. As the spacecraft ages, more and more
failures are expected, both in its mechanical parts and its
computer system, although there is no sign, even now, of a
serious memory deterioration, some robot Alzheimer's disease.
When an unexpected failure occurs, special teams of engineers —
some of whom had been with the Voyager program since its
inception -- were assigned to "work" the problem. They would
study the underlying basic science and draw upon their previous
experience with the failed subsystems. They would do experiments
with identical Voyager spacecraft equipment that was never
launched, or even manufacture a large number of components of the
sort that failed in order to gain some statistical understanding
of the failure mode.
In April 1978, almost eight months after launch, aa omitted
ground command caused Voyager ¿'s on-board computer to switch
from the prime radio receiver to its backup. During the next
ground transmission to the spacecraft, the receiver refused to
lock onto the signal from Earth. A component called a tracking
loop capacitor had failed. After seven days in which Voyager 2,
was out of contact, its fault protection software commanded the
backup receiver to be switched off and the prime receiver to be
o switched back on. Mysteriously, the prime receiver failed

/+u ç-.y./
O moments later. It never recovered. Voya< er 2 was now
fundamentally imperiled. Although the primary receiver hñfl,
failed, jbhe on-board computer commanded the spacecraft to use
There seemed to be no way for the human controllers on Earth to
get Vovaaer to revert to the backup receiver. Even worse, the
backup receiver would be unable to receive the commands from
Earth — because of the failed capacitor. Some mission
controllers were convinced that all was lost. Finally, after a
week of sullon unresponsiveness to all commands, instructions to
switch automatically between receivers were accepted and
programmed into the on-board computer. And during that week the
JPL engineers had designed an innovative command frequency
control procedure to make certain essential oommnndg O * "* ***
comprehensible to the damaged backup receiver.
This meant the engineers were now able to communicate, at
least a little bit, with the spacecraft. Unfortunately the
backup receiver now turned giddy, becoming extremely sensitive to
the stray heat dumped when various components of the spacecraft
powered up or down. Over the following months the JPL engineers
designed and conducted a series of tests that let them thoroughly
understand the thermal consequences of most operational modes of
the spacecraft on the spacecraft '.s ability to receive commands
from Earth. The backup-receiver problem was entirely
circumvented. It was this backup receiver that acquired all the
commands from Earth on how to gather data in the Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune systems. The engineers had saved the

mission. (But to be on the safe side, during most of Voyager's
subsequent flight a nominal data-taking sequence for the next
planet to be encountered was always in residence in the on-board
computers.)
Another heart-wrenching failure occurred just after Voyager
2 emerged from behind Saturn (as seen from the Earth) in August
1981. The scan platform had been moving rapidly — quickly
pointing here and there among the rings, moons, and the planet
itself during the time of closest approach. Suddenly, the
platform jammed. A stuck scan platform obviously means a severe
reduction in future pictures and other key data. The scan
platform is driven by gear trains called actuators, so first the
JPL engineers ran an identical copy of the flight actuator in a
simulated mission. The ground actuator failed after 348
revolutions; the actuator on the spacecraft had failed after 352
revolutions. The problem turned out to be a lubrication failure.
Plainly, it would be impossible to overtake Voyager with an oil
can.
The engineers wondered whether it would be possible to
restart the failed actuator by alternately heating and cooling
it, so that the thermal stresses would cause the components of
the actuator to expand and contract at different rates and un-jam
the system. After gaining experience with specially manufactured
actuators on the ground, the engineers jubilantly found that this
["The Triumph of Voyager" (2A, 2/20/93)] 10
procedure started the scan platform up again in space. More than

this, they devised techniques to diagnose any imminent actuator
failure early enough to work around the problem. Voyager 2's
scan platform worked perfectly in the Uranus and Neptune systems.
The engineers had saved the day again.
Voyager 1 and 2 were designed to explore the Jupiter and
Saturn systems only. It is true that their trajectories would
carry them to Uranus and Neptune, but officially these planets
were never contemplated as targets for Voyager exploration: The
spacecraft were not supposed to last that long. Because of the
need to pass close to Titan, Voyager X was flung by Saturn on a
path that could never encounter any other known world; it is
Voyager 2 that flew on to Uranus and Neptune with brilliant
success. At these immense distances, sunlight is getting
progressively dimmer, and the spacecraft's transmitted radio
signals to Earth are getting progressively fainter. These were
predictable but still very serious problems that the JPL
engineers and scientists also had to solve.
Because of the low light levels at Uranus and Neptune, the
Voyager television cameras were obliged to take longer time
exposures. But the spacecraft was hurtling so fast through, say,
the Uranus system (at about 35,000 miles per hour) that the image
would have been smeared or blurred. To overcome this, the entire
spacecraft had to be moved during the time exposures to
compensate for the motion, like panning in the direction opposite
yours while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving

car. This may sound easier than it is: You have to compensate
for the most casual of motions; at zero gravity, the mere start
and stop of the on-board tape recorder that's registering the
image can jiggle the spacecraft enough to smear the picture.
This problem was solved by commanding the spacecraft's little
rocket engines (called thrusters), machines of exquisite
sensitivity, to compensate for the tape-recorder jiggle at the
start and stop of each sequence by turning the entire spacecraft
just a little. To compensate for the low received radio power at
Earth, a new and more efficient digital encoding algorithm was
designed for the cameras, and the radio telescopes on Earth were
joined together with others to increase their sensitivity.
Overall, the imaging system worked, by many criteria, better at
Uranus than it did at Saturn or even at Jupiter.
Vovaaer may not yet be done exploring. There is, of course,
a chance that some vital subsystem will fail tomorrow, but in
terms of the radioactive decay of the plutonium power source, the
two Voyager spacecraft should be able to return data to Earth
until roughly the year 2015. By then they will have traveled
more than a hundred times the Earth's distance from the Sun, and
may have penetrated the heliopause, the place where the
interplanetary magnetic field and charged particles are replaced
by their interstellar counterparts; the heliopause is one
definition of the frontier of the Solar System.
Voyager has become a kind of intelligent being — part

robot, part human. It extends the human senses to far-off
worlds. For simple tasks and short-term problems, it relies on
its own intelligence; but for more complex tasks and longer term
problems, it turns to another, considerably larger brain — the
collective intelligence and experience of the JPL engineers.
This trend is sure to grow. The Voyagers embody the technology
of the early 1970s; if such spacecraft were to be designed in the
near future, they would incorporate stunning improvements in
artificial intelligence, in data-processing speed, in the ability
to self-diagnose and repair, and in the capacity for the
spacecraft to learn from experience. In the many environments
too dangerous for people, the future belongs to robot-human
partnerships that will recognize the two Voyagers as antecedents
and pioneers. This is another reason for their historical
importance.
The Voyager spacecraft came in at cost, on time, and vastly
exceeding both their design specifications and the fondest dreams
of their builders. These machines do not seek to control,
threaten, wound, or destroy; they represent the exploratory part
of our nature, set free to roam the Solar System and beyond.
This kind of technology, its findings freely r**"^"1 "^ to all
•ufo
humans everywhere, has been, over the last few decades, one of
the few activities of the United States admired as much by those
who find our policies uncongenial as by those who agree with us
on every issue. Missions to the planets are one of those things

— and I mean this not just for the United states, but for the
entire human species — that we do best. We are tool makers, and
the right tools, wisely chosen, can vastly improve our prospect.
[2A, 2/20/93]
"No Small Rapture":
Voyager at Titan
I know a world, midway in size between the Moon and Mars,

where the upper air is rippling with electricity pouring in from
a giant ringed planet; where the perpetual brown overcast is
tinged an odd burnt orange; and where the stuff of life falls out
of the skies onto the unknown surface below. This world is so
far away that light takes over an hour to get there from the Sun.
Spacecraft from Earth take years. We have examined it in
reflected sunlight, probed its surface with radar, and
investigated it close-up with robot spacecraft. Much about it is
still a mystery — including whether it holds great oceans. We
know just enough, though, to recognize that within our reach is a
place where some of the processes are today working themselves
out that long ago led to the origin of life on Earth.
The oldest known fossils date to about 3.6 billion years
ago. Of course, the origin of life had to have happened well
before that. But 4.3 or 4.2 billion years ago the Earth was
being so ravaged by the final stages of its formation that life
then could not yet have come into being; indeed, massive
collisions were melting the surface and turning the oceans into
steam. So there's a fairly narrow window around 4 billion years
ago in which our most distant ancestors arose.
The first living things were far less capable than the most
humble microbe alive today, perhaps just barely able to make
["•No Small Rapture': Voyager at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)]
crude copies of themselves. But natural selection, the

evolutionary process first coherently described by Charles
Darwin, is so powerful that from such simple beginnings there can
emerge all the richness and beauty of the biological world of
which we are a part.
Those first living things were made of pieces, parts,
building blocks which had to come into being on their own — that
is, driven by the laws of physics and chemistry. The building
blocks of all life on Earth are called organic molecules,
molecules based on carbon. Of the stupendous number of possible
organic molecules, only a very few are used at the heart of life.
The two most important kinds are the amino acids, the building
blocks of proteins, and the nucleotides, the building blocks of
the nucleic acids.
Just before the origin of life, where did these molecules
come from? There are only two possibilities: from the outside
or from the inside. We know that vastly more comets and
asteroids were hitting the Earth then than do so now, and that
these small worlds are rich storehouses of complex organic
molecules. But here I want to talk about homemade, not imported,
goods: the organic molecules generated in the air and waters of
the early Earth.
Unfortunately, we don't know very much about the composition
of the early atmosphere, and organic molecules are far easier to
make in some atmospheres than in others. There couldn't have
["•No Small Rapture': Voyager at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)] 3
been much oxygen, because oxygen is generated by green plants and

there weren't any green plants yet. There was probably more
hydrogen, because hydrogen is very abundant in the Universe and
escapes from the upper atmosphere of the Earth into space
(because it's so light) better than any other atom. We can
imagine what various early atmospheres were, duplicate them in
the laboratory, supply some energy and see what organic molecules
are made — and, indeed, such experiments have over the years
been very provocative and promising. But our ignorance of
initial conditions limits the relevance of such experiments.
What we need is a real world whose atmosphere still retains
some hydrogen-rich gases, a world in other respects something
like the Earth, a world in which the organic building blocks of
life are being generated in our own time, a world we could go to
to seek our own beginnings. There is only one such world in the
Solar System. This world is Titan, the big moon of Saturn.
**-
The Voyager spacecraft todus that the atmosphere of Titan
W
is composed mainly of nitrogen, N2, as is the Earth's today. Its
other principal constituent is methane, CH4, the starting
material from which carbon-based organic molecules are generated
there. There's about ten times more air on Titan than there is
on the Earth today, but the early Earth may well have had a
denser atmosphere, ultraviolet light from the Sun is falling on
There could have been none; we're very lucky. The others
have too much hydrogen, or not enough hydrogen, or no atmospheres
at all.
["•No Small Rapture': Voyager at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)] 4
Titan as it did on the primitive Earth. Beams of electrons

trapped in the magnetic field of giant Saturn fall on the upper
air of Titan, just as charged particles from the solar wind fell
on the primitive Earth.
But no world is a perfect replica of any other, and there is
at least one important respect in which Titan is very different
from the primitive Earth: Being so far from the Sun, its surface
is extremely cold, far below the freezing point of water, around
180° below zero Centigrade. So while the Earth at the time of
the origin of life was, as now, mainly ocean-covered, there can
be no oceans of liquid water on Titan. The low temperatures give
an advantage as well, though, because they mean that once
molecules are synthesized on Titan, they stick around. The
higher the temperature, the faster molecules fall to pieces. On
Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from
heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be largely
unaltered, deep-frozen ill their earliest state, awaiting the
chemists from Earth.
* * *
The invention of the telescope in the seventeenth century

led to the discovery of many new worlds. In 1610 Galileo first
spied the four large moons of Jupiter. Forty-five years later,
the celebrated Dutch physicist, Christianus Huygens, discovered a
["•Ho Small Rapture': Voyager at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)]
point of light moving about the planet Saturn and named it Titan
-- not because he thought it remarkably large, but because in
Greek mythology the generation which preceded the Olympians, and
that included the god Saturn, was called the Titans. It was a
dot of light gleaming in reflected sunlight a billion miles away.
From the time of its discovery, when European men wore long curly
wigs, to World War II, when American men cut their hair down to
stubble, almost nothing more was discovered about Titan except
the fact it had a curious, tawny, orangish or brownish color.
Ground-based telescopes could just barely make out some enigmatic
detail. The Spanish astronomer, Comas Sola, reported at the turn
of the twentieth century faint variable markings on Titan that he
thought to be clouds. It was a minor controversy.
In a way, I grew up with Titan. I did my doctoral thesis at
the University of Chicago under the guidance of Gerard P. Kuiper,
the man who discovered that Titan had an atmosphere. Kuiper was
Dutch and, in a way, in a direct line of intellectual descent
from Christian Huygens. In 1944, while making a spectroscopic
examination of Titan, he was astonished to find the
characteristic spectral features of the gas methane. When he
pointed the telescope at Titan, there was the signature of
methane as well. When he pointed it away, not a hint of methane.
But moons are not supposed to have atmospheres, and the Earth's
Moon certainly does not (or at least nothing to speak of). Titan
could retain an atmosphere, Kuiper realized, even though its
["'No Small Rapture»: Voyager at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)]
gravity was less than Earth's, if the temperature in its upper

atmosphere wert very low. The molecules simply aren't moving
fast enough for large numbers of them to achieve escape velocity
and trickle away to space.
If you wanted to learn more about Titan, you could also
measure the polarization of sunlight reflected off it. Ordinary
sunlight is unpolarized. Joseph Veverka, nowât Cornell
university, was my graduate student at Harvard University. In
his doctoral work, around 1970, he measured the polarization of
Titan and found that it changed as the relative positions of
Titan, the Sun, and the Earth changed. But the change was very
different from that exhibited by, say, the Noon. Veverka
concluded that the character of this variation was consistent
with clouds or haze on Titan.
So, by the early 1970s we knew, as a kind of legacy from
Huygens, that Titan had a dense methane-rich atmosphere, and that
it is probably enveloped by a reddish cloud veil or aerosol haze.
But what kind of cloud was red? We knew that the irradiation (by
ultraviolet light from the Sun or by protons and electrons) of
mixtures of methane and other gases produced complex organic
molecules, some of which were red. It was therefore not a daring
hypothesis to propose, as I did at the time, that the Titan haze
layer is composed at least in part of complex organic molecules.
By the early 1970s my colleague Bishun Khare and I had been doing
experiments at Cornell in which we irradiated methane-rich
["'No Small Rapture': Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)]
atmospheres with charged particles and were making a kind of

reddish or brownish solid that would coat the interior of our
reaction vessel. It seemed to me very likely that if methane-
rich Titan had brownish clouds, that those clouds might be
similar to what we were making in the laboratory. We called this
stuff tholin. While at the beginning we had very little idea
what it was made of, it clearly consisted of complex organic
molecules.
I want to stress that the word "organic" here carries no
implication of biological origin; following long-standing
chemical usage dating back more than a century, it merely refers
to molecules based upon carbon (excluding a few very simple
carbon-based molecules such as carbon monoxide, CO, and carbon
dioxide, CO2). Since life on Earth is based on organic
molecules, and since there was a time before there was life on
Earth, there must have been some process which made organic
molecules on our planet before the advent of life. Something
similar, I thought, might be happening on Titan today, and have
some relevance to the origin of life.
The epochal event in our understanding of Titan was the
arrival in 1980 and 1981 of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2
spacecraft in the Saturn system. Threading its way past moon
after moon, skirting the edge of the magnificent ring system,
Voyager 2 left the Saturn system on a trajectory that would take
it ~ immensely successfully, as it turned out -- to Uranus and
[M,No Small Rapture': Voyager at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)]
Neptune. But to make a close fly-by of Titan, Voyager 1 had to

forego the option of a rendezvous with the worlds beyond. -TilaiT^
was considered so important an uLjuutlVfa LliaL we. were willing te—
caerifico much to study it. [nedundanfiq. The ultraviolet,
infrared, and radio instruments gathered in a treasure-trove of
data. We learned the pressure and temperature from the surface
to high up in the atmosphere. We discovered a variety of simple
organic molecules present as gases, mainly hydrocarbons and
nitriles. Hydrocarbons are molecules composed of carbon and
hydrogen atoms only, and are familiar to us as constituents of
natural gas, petroleum, and waxes. Nitriles are molecules with a
carbon and nitrogen atom attached in a particular way. The best
known of these is HCN, hydrogen cyanide, a deadly gas for humans.
But hydrogen cyanide is implicated in the steps that on Earth led
to the origin of Ufa. Finding these simple organic molecules in
the upper atmosphere — even if present only in a part per
million or a part per billion — is tantalizing.
So we now know that the atmosphere of Titan is composed
primarily of nitrogen and methane, and that among the minor
atmospheric constituents are nine organic molecules, the most
complex of which have four carbon and/or nitrogen atoms.
Moreover, Voyager discovered a large region of energetic
electrons and protons surrounding Saturn, trapped by the planet's
magnetic field. During the course of its orbital motion around
Saturn, Titan bobs in and out of this magnetosphere. Thus it is
["•No Small RaptureH Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)]
natural to try irradiating a mixture of nitrogen and methane,

simulating the atmosphere of Titan, with ultraviolet light or
charged particles to see what more complex molecules can be made.
With w. Reid Thompson playing a key role in our laboratory
at Cornell, we've simulated Titan's manufacture of organic gases.
We cause high-energy electrons, like those that Saturn conveys to
Titan, to irradiate a laboratory mixture of nitrogen and methane
at very low pressures, simulating the altitude where the
electrons are stopped. We make a large variety of different
organic gases, the most complex with 6 or 7 carbon and/or
nitrogen atoms. These product gases seem to be on their way to
forming tholins, the organic solids also made in such
experiments. We know that the simplest hydrocarbons on Titan are
manufactured by ultraviolet light from the Sun. But for all the
other gas products, those made most readily in the laboratory
correspond to those discovered by Voyager on Titan, and in the
proper abundances. The next most abundant gases that we find in
the laboratory will be looked for in future studies of Titan.
We had hoped for a break in the weather as Voyager l
approached Titan. A long distance away, it appeared only as a
tiny circle; at closest approach, our camera's field of view was
filled by a tiny piece of Titan. If there had been a break in
the haze and clouds of Titan only a few miles across [check], we
would have had a chance to see details on its hidden and
enigmatic surface. But there was no hint of a break. This world
["•No Small Rapture's Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)] 10
is socked in. Mo one knows what its surface looks like.

But from Voyager and other measurements from the vicinity of
the Earth, we know a fair amount about the orangish-brown haze
particles that obscure the surface: which colors of light they
like to absorb, which colors they pretty much let pass through
them, and how much they bend the light that does pass through
them. These "optical properties" will depend, of course, on the
composition of the haze particles.
When we irradiate a simulated Titan atmosphere with
electrons, we make a particular reddish-brown powder that we call
Titan tholin. In collaboration with Edward Arakawa of Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee, we've measured the optical
properties of Titan tholin. It turns out to be a dead ringer for
the real Titan haze. No other candidate material matches the
optical constants of Titan. [Figure.] So we can fairly claim to
have bottled the haze of Titan [same phrasing in Cosmos?1 —
formed high in its atmosphere, slowly falling out, and
accumulating in vast amounts on its surface. What is this stuff
made of?
It's very hard to know the exact chemical composition of a
complex chemical solid. For example, the chemistry of coal —
where there's a powerful economic motive to understand exactly
what it's made of — is still not well understood. But there are
some things that we do know about Titan tholin. We find it to be
an extremely complex organic material containing many of the
["•No Small Rapture1: Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)3 12
•
something about its composition. The average density of Titan
lies between the density of ice and the density of rock. Both
ice and rock are abundant on nearby worlds, with some of them
made purely of ice. If the surface of Titan is icy, a high-speed
impact will melt the ice. Thompson and I estimate that any given
spot on Titan's surface has a better than 50-50 chance of having
once been melted, with an average lifetime of the impact melt of
about a thousand years.
This makes for a very different story. The origin of life
on our planet about four billion years ago seems to have happened
in the oceans and shallow tide pools. All life on Earth is made
mainly of water, and it plays an essential physical and chemical
role. It's hard for us water-besotted creatures to imagine life
without water. If the tholins had been mixed into liquid water
— even for only a thousand years — the surface of Titan may be
much further along towards the origin of life than we thought.
I hope I haven't made it seem that we understand everything
about Titan. In fact, we understand pitifully little and are
lucky to have gotten that far. This was brought home forcefully
to me at a recent scientific symposium on Titan held in Toulouse,
France and sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA). While
oceans of liquid water are impossible on Titan, oceans of liquid
hydrocarbons are not. Clouds of methane (CH4), the most abundant
hydrocarbon, are expected not far above the surface. Ethane
(C2H6) ,the next most abundant hydrocarbon, must condense out at
[•"No Small Rapture»: Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)] 13
the surface in the same way that water vapor becomes a liquid
near the surface of the Earth, where the temperature drops below
the freezing point. Vast oceans of liquid hydrocarbons should
have accumulated over the lifetime of Titan. They would lie far
beneath the haze and clouds, but that doesn't mean they would be
inaccessible to us ~ because radio waves readily penetrate
through the atmosphere of Titan and its suspended fine particles.
In Toulouse, Duane O. Muhleman of the California Institute
of Technology described to us the very difficult technical feat
of transmitting a set of radio pulses from a radiotélescope in
the Mohave desert, having them reach Titan, penetrate through to
its surface, be reflected back into space, and then travel back
to Earth — where the by now feeble signal is detected by an
array of radiotélescopes near Socorro, New Mexico. Great. But
if Titan were covered with hydrocarbon oceans, Muhleman wouldn't
have seen a thing. Liquid hydrocarbons are black to radio waves.
All right, you might say, so Titan has oceans and continents, and
it was a continent that reflected back the signals from Earth.
And indeed, Muhleman sees Titan with his giant radar system when
he's looking at some parts of Titan, but not for others. But
then you run into another problem:
The orbit of Titan around Saturn is not a perfect circle.
It's noticeably squashed out, or elliptical. If Titan has
extensive hydrocarbon oceans, the giant planet Saturn around
which it orbits will raise substantial tides on Titan, and the
["•No Small Rapture': Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)] 14
resulting tidal friction Hill circularize the orbit of Titan in

much less than the age of the Solar System. In a 1982 scientific
paper called "The Tide in the Seas of Titan," Stanley Dermott,
now at the University of Florida, and I argued that for this
reason Titan must be either an all-ocean or an all-land world.
Otherwise the tidal friction in places where the ocean is shallow
would take its toll. A few lakes or islands might be permitted,
but anything more and Titan would have a very different orbit
than the one we see. We have, then, three scientific arguments
— one saying the world is almost entirely covered with
hydrocarbon oceans, another saying almost all continents and no
oceans, and a third saying that you have to choose; you can't
have abundant oceans and abundant land both. It will be
interesting to see what the answer turns out to be.
What I've just told you is a kind of scientific progress
report. Tomorrow there might be a new finding that clears up
these mysteries and contradictions. Maybe there's something
wrong with Muhleman's radar results, although it's hard to see
what it might be: His system tells him he's seeing Titan when
it's nearest, when he ought to be seeing Titan. Maybe there's
something wrong with Dermott's and my calculation about the tidal
evolution of the orbit of Titan, but experts have been unable to
find any errors so far. And it's hard to see how ethane can
avoid condensing out at the surface of Titan. Maybe, despite the
low temperatures, over billions of years there's been a change in
["«No Small Rapture': Voyager at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)) 15
the chemistry; maybe some combination of comets impacting from

the sky and volcanoes and othei tectonic events, helped along by
cosmic rays, can congeal liquid hydrocarbons, turning them into
some complex organic solid that reflects radio waves back to
space. Or maybe something that reflects radio waves is floating
on top of the ocean; but liquid hydrocarbons are very underdense:
All known organic solids, unless incredibly frothy, would sink
like a stone in the seas of Titan.
Should we expect an icy surface covered with a deep layer of
tholins, a hydrocarbon ocean with at most a few organic-encrusted
islands poking up here and there, or something quite different
that we haven't yet been clever enough to figure out? This isn't
just an academic question, because there's a real spacecraft
being designed to go to Titan. In a joint NASA/ESA program,
sometime after the turn of the century, if all goes well, a
spacecraft called Cassini will be injected into orbit around
Saturn. Each time the spacecraft comes close to Titan, the moon
will be examined by an array of instruments, including radar
which, because it will be so close to Titan, will be much more
sensitive and be able to resolve many more details on Titan's
suface than Muhleman's pioneering system. It's also possible
that regions of transparency in the haze and cloud will be found
in the near infrared, and that maps of the hidden surface of
Titan will be in our hands sometime early in the twenty-first
century.
["•No Small Rapture': Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)] 16
Cassini Is also carrying an entry probe, fittingly called

Huygens, which will detach itself from Cassini and plummet into
Titan's atmosphere. A great parachute will be deployed and the
instrumented package will slowly settle through the organic haze
down into the lower atmosphere, perhaps through the methane
clouds, and settle gently onto the surface. It will examine
organic chemistry as it descends, and on the ground as well.
Nothing is guaranteed. But the mission is technically
feasible, hardware is being built, an impressive coterie of
specialists, including many young European scientists, are at
work on it, and all the nations responsible are committed to it.
Perhaps it will actually come about. Perhaps winging across the
billion niles of intervening interplanetary space we will, in the
not too distant future, begin receiving news about how far along
the path to life Titan has come.
When Huygens contemplated Galileo's work, he mused that it
must have been "with no small rapture" that the moons of Jupiter
had been rfini7nirrrc.fi. And we know from Huygen's own writings the
rapture that he felt in his astronomical findings, not the least
of which was his discovery of Titan. We have, in a little over
three centuries, moved from the discovery of Titan as a point of
light circling Saturn to our finding that it is a tantalizing
world, strangely similar — except for the fact that it is stuck
out there, a billion miles from the Sun — to the primitive
Earth. When, in the future, our flybys make a radar map of the
["•No Small Rapture's Vovaaer at Titan" (2A, 2/20/93)] 17
unknown surface of Titan, when our entry probes slowly sink

through the organic haze, when our landers begin returning
imaging and chemical data from the surface of Titan, we will once
again experience, no less than Galileo and Huygens, the rapture
of seeing another world for the first time.
[Broca II, draftj., 8/12/92]
1983, #9: Foreword to The Planets. B/C. Murray, ed. (A

Scientific American Book) (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman).
Our ancestors looked up into the night sky, and of the

thousands of shimmering points of light they noticed five that
ed out of the ordinary. Unlike all the other stars, these
five changed their relative positions through the course of
months. They wandered, in a regular but complex pattern, from
constellation to constellation. It was hard to tell what these
wandering ©tars — or indeed the other so-called "fixed" stars —
really/were. It must have been a topic of protracted
speculation and debate.
S3 ■».-...*• UX /
Eventually tha nfrmfyi nf-tnftn hrrnmn attflrhrritn fl The
faint, fast-moving one that was never far from the Sun was named
Mercury, after the messenger of the gods; the most brilliant of
them was named Venus, after the goddess of beauty; the blood red
one was named Mars, after the god of war; the bright yellowish—•
slow moving mm was called Jupiter, after the king of the gods;—
and the faint slowest-moving of the five was named Saturn, after
the god of time. These metaphorical allusions were the best our
ancestors could do: They had no scientific instruments beyond
+U , ;
the naked eye, and they were confined to Earth. Put in thr fvr
centurie been a
revolution of histor" in our understanding of the
nature of these wa ght that we now call
[2A, 2/20/93]
An American Ship at the Frontiers of the Solar System:
Voyager at Uranus and Neptune
Before we invented civilization, our ancestors lived mainly

in the open, out under the sky. Before we devised artificial
lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal
entertainment, we watched the stars. There were practical
calendrical reasons, of course, but they weren't the only reason.
Even today, the most jaded city-dweller can be unexpectedly moved
when encountering, sometimes by accident, a clear night sky
studded with thousands of stars. When it happens to me, even
after all these years, it still takes my breath away. As a
child, before you know anything about the nature and distance of
the stars, you can feel a sense of awe. In every culture, the
night sky and the religious impulse were connected.
Our ancestors, watching the stars, soon noticed five of them
that did more than rise and set in stolid procession among the
so-called "fixed" stars; these five also slowly wandered with
respect to the other stars. Today we call them planets, which is
the Greek word for wanderers. We know now that the planets are
not stars but are rather other worlds, gravitationally bound to
the Sun and, like our own world, reflecting its light back to
space. Sharing the odd apparent motion of the planets were the
Sun and Moon, making seven wandering bodies in all.
It-waj apydiëIT£_fco the ancientsj ¿hese seven bodies were
m important, and they named them after gods — not any old gods,
,,4-Vi tln't"fr A»^*> ^*- «»»» «^ A-* 4—1/
„<¿.k«r- A»^
iÔ íc*¿- VU ^ *
["An American Shi Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A) ] 2
but the main7ods/0ne of the planets, bright and slow-moving,

was named by the Babylonians after Marduk, by the Norse after
Odin, and bylthe Romans after Jupiter, in each case the ohiaf kVns
g.cii:ri1 rTiiitiy iJJnr number seven began to acquire mystic
significance. When it got to be time to design the week — a
period of time, unlike the day, month, and year, with no
intrinsic astronomical significance — it was given seven days,
each named after one of the seven anomalous lights in the night
sky. We can readily make out the remnants of this convention.
Sunday and Monday are clear enough. Tuesday through Friday are
named after the Norse gods: Wednesday is Odin's (or Wodin's)
day, which would be more apparent if we pronounced it as it is
spelled; Thursday is Thor's day; Saturday is from the Roman god
Saturn. This collection of seven, seven days and seven worlds —
the Sun, the Noon, and the five wandering planets — entered the
perceptions of people everywhere as an eternal verity.
It was, therefore, with a real sense of surprise that people
heard in 1781 about a new planet, discovered with the telescope.
That there yere new planets to be found and that humans had
invented the means to do so were both considered remarkable. The
discovery was not even made by a professional astronomer but by
William Herschel, a musician whose family had come to Britain
with the family of another anglified German, the reigning
monarch, King George III. It became Herschel's wish to name the
planet George ("George's Star," actually), but posterity has been
["An American Ship* Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 3
viser. Instead, the planet that Herschel discovered is called

Uranus, after the ancient sky god who was Saturn's father and
Jupiter's grandfather. We no longer count the Sun and Moon as
planets, and we now understand that the Earth is just one of the
planets. Thus, Uranus is the seventh planet in order from the
Sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, Pluto) and the first planet unknown to the ancients.
As the years passed and the quality of astronomical
instruments improved, we began to learn more about Uranus. What
reflects the dim sunlight back to us is no solid surface, but
atmosphere and clouds — just as for Jupiter, Saturn, and
Neptune. Far below, under crushing pressures, there may be a
rocky surface something like the Earth's. The upper atmosphere
is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, the two simplest
gases. Methane and other hydrocarbons are also present. Deeper
in the atmosphere, below the visible clouds, there are enormous
quantities of ammonia and, especially, water.
Uranus is lying on its side as it goes around the Sun. in
the 1990s, the south pole is heated by the Sun, and it is this
pole that Earthbound observers now see when they look at Uranus.
It takes Uranus 84 Earth years to go once around the Sun. So in
the 2030s, the north pole will be sunward, and in 84 years the
south pole will be pointing to the Sun again. In between,
astronomers on Earth will look mainly at equatorial latitudes.
All the other planets spin much more upright in their orbits.
Ü7
["An American Ship. Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A) ] 4
«bul Ul'anus1 axiL, is tilted 97 degrees». No one knows the reason

for this anomaly; the most promising suggestion is that sometime
in the early history of Uranus, billions of years ago, it was
struck by a rogue planet, about the size of the Earth, in a
highly eccentric orbit. Such a collision, if it ever happened,
must have worked much havoc in the Uranus system; and« for all we
know, there may be other^sigwe of that^havoc still left for us to
see. But Uranus is very far away, and it io difficult Lü léante.
r«v»,+t«t>í •£**+& ¡4-% mw s ^Ce *-,' « s
much-about it from tho Earth ■■ /
In 1977, a team of scientists led by James Elliot, then of
Cornell University, discovered the rings of Uranus. The
scientists were flying over the Indian Ocean in a special NASA
airplane to witness the passage of Uranus in front of a distant
star. (Such passages, or occultations, as they are called,
happen from time to time, because Uranus slowly moves with
respect to the distant stars.) The observers were surprised to
find that the star winked on and off several times just before it
passed behind Uranus, then several times more just after it
emerged. Since the patterns of winking on and off were the same
for oymmefegiofr- before and after occultation, this finding (and
subsequent work) has led to the discovery of nine very thin, very
dark rings surrounding the planet, giving it the appearance of a
bull's eye in the sky.
Surrounding the rings, Earthbound observers understood, were
the orbits of the five known moons of Uranus: Miranda, Ariel,
["An American Ship, Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 5
Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. They are all named after

characters in Shakespeare's A. Midsummer Night's Dream and The
Tempest. and in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Two of
them were discovered by Herschel himself. The innermost of these
my «/«Attar"
five moons, Miranda, was discovered as recently as 1948 by G. P.
Kuiper. I remember how great an achievement the discovery of a
new moon of Uranus was considered back then. The infrared light
emitted by the five moons subsequently revealed the spectral
signature of ordinary water ice on their surfaces, and no wonder
— Uranus is so far from the Sun that it is no brighter there at
noontime than it is shortly after sunset on Earth. Any water of
course will be frozen.
A revolution in our understanding of the Uranus system —
the planet, its rings, and its moons — began on January 24,
1986. On that day, after an epic journey of Bh years, the
&«. ,7» Û
Voyager 2. spacecraft flaw through the Uranus system very near to
Miranda, piercing the bull's eye in the sky. Uranus' gravity
then flung the spacecraft on to Neptune. The spacecraft returned
4,300 close-up pictures of the Uranus system and a wealth of
other data.
Uranus is surrounded by an intense radiation belt, electrons
and protons trapped by the planet's magnetic field. On the Earth gt)
the magnetic and the geographical poles are quite close together,
but on Uranus the magnetic axis and the axis of rotation are
tilted away from each other by some 60 degrees. No one yet
["An American Ship. . .: yoyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 6
understands why: Perhaps we are catching Uranus in a reversal of

its north and south magnetic poles, as periodically happens on
Earth. The planet is emitting much more ultraviolet light than
it is receiving from the Sun, perhaps generated by charged
particles striking its upper atmosphere. From a vantage point in
the Uranus system, the spacecraft examined a bright star winking
on and off as the rings of Uranus passed by. Many new rings were
thereby found. From the vantage point of Earth, the spacecraft
passed behind Uranus, and so the radio signals it was
transmitting back home penetrated the Uranian atmosphere and
probed it to a considerable depth — to below its methane clouds.
A vast and deep ocean, perhaps 8,000 kilometers thick, of
superheated liquid water is inferred by some.
But among the principal glories of the Uranus encounter
were the 4,300 pictures. With the two television cameras on the
spacecraft, we discovered 10 new moons, determined the length of
the day in the clouds of Uranus (about 17 hours), and studied
about a dozen full rings and many apparently incomplete ones.
The most spectacular pictures were those returned from the five
previously known moons of Uranus, especially the smallest of
them, Miranda. Its surface is covered with fault valleys,
parallel ridges, sheer cliffs, low mountains, impact craters.
The turmoil so evident on its surface is unexpected for a small,
cold, icy world so distant from the Sun. Perhaps the surface was
melted and reworked in some long-gone epoch when a gravitational
#
["An American Ship. . .: Vovaaer at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 7
resonance between Uranus, Miranda, and Ariel pumped energy from

the nearby planet into Miranda's interior. Or perhaps the
turmoil is connected with the primordial collision that is
thought to have knocked Uranus ovar. Or perhaps Miranda has once
been utterly destroyed, dismembered, blasted into many pieces by
a giant collision. But if the collision was of the right energy,
it could have demolished Miranda but not driven the pieces out of
Miranda's orbit. The fragments, slowly colliding and
gravitationally attracting one another, may have reaggregated
into just such a jumbled, unfinished-1 esiting appearance as
Miranda shows us today.
There are other signs of a reworking of the surfaces of
these worlds. They are mainly colorless, ranging from gray/brown
for Ariel to pitch black for the rings and the newly discovered
interior moons. It seems likely that the charged particles in
the Uranian radiation belt have played a major role in destroying
molecules responsible for color on the surfaces of the moons and
generating a kind of carbon black from snows that once contained
methane.
For me, there is something almost eerie about the pictures
of dusky Miranda, because I can remember so well when it was only
a faint point of light almost lost in the glare of Uranus,
discovered through great difficulty by dint of the astronomer's
skills. In only half a lifetime it has gone from an undiscovered
world to an exotic place whose ancient and idiosyncratic secrets
[•'An American Ship. . .: Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A) ] 8
have been at least partially revealed. The pace of discovery is

breathtaking ~ and continuing.
* * *
We are completing the preliminary reconnaissance of the

solar system in which we live. Our robot emissaries are visiting
worlds whose very existence was unknown to most of the humans who
have ever lived.
Neptune was the final port-of-call in Voyager 2's grand tour
of the Solar System. Usually, it is thought of as the
penultimate planet, with Pluto as the outermost. But because of
Pluto's stretched-out, elliptical orbit, Neptune has lately been
the outermost planet and will remain so until the year 1999.
Neptune is so far away that, in its sky, the Sun appears as
little more than an extremely bright star. Typical temperatures
in its upper clouds are about -400°F, or -240°C, precisely
because it is so far from the warming rays of the Sun. It lives
on the edge of interstellar night.
How far? /it's so far away from the Earth that it cannot be^
seen with the naked eye. /It's so far away that it hasnrftr yet *fe
complétée! a single trip around the Sun since its discovery in
1846. (It takes so long to circuit the Sun because its orbit is
so vast, 23 billion miles around, and because the force of the
Sun's gravity at that distance is comparatively weak.) «It's so
["An American Ship. . Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A) ] 9
far away that it takes light — faster than which nothing can go
— six hours [check] to get from Neptuna to Earth. 3r-mezm far*
When Voyager Z raced through the Neptune system in 1989, its

cameras, spectrometers, particle and field detectors, and other
instruments were feverishly examining the planet, its moons, and
its rings in rapid succession. The planet itself — like its
cousins Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus — is a gas giant. Neptune
is four times bigger than the Earth. When we look down on its
cool, austere blueness, we are seeing only atmosphere and clouds
— no solid surface. The atmosphere is made mainly of hydrogen
and helium, with a little methane and traces of other
hydrocarbons. There may also be nitrogen. The bright clouds,
which seem to be methane crystals, are poised above thick, deeper
clouds of unknown composition. The h-ivte. color /*H so appropriate
to a planet named for the god of the sea # ■" is duu pdiLly Lu Lhe—
—nttarini r ■■■■"'■!'■' ' <\ ■' i«. n-u... finu UATH* pi-ncnaa that—■
jnakea Lhe ¿¿Jilfeü uf the Earth blue) , and partly -co uie absuipLlun -
of rod light by methane gas. From the motion of the clouds we
find fierce winds, approaching the speed of sound. A great dark
spot was discovered, oddly, at almost the same latitude as the
Great Red Spot on Jupiter. If there is any solid surface, it
lies far deeper than any of our instruments have yet been able to
probe. There probably is a rocky and metallic Earthlike object
burled at the core of Neptune. The planet's magnetic field seems
tied to the deep interior, so ve know how fast the interior

rotates.
This is a blue, dimly lit, chilly, stormy, and remote world
— but, despite all that, Neptune, it turns out, has much to
teach us about our own planet.
Surrounding Neptune (like the other three gas giants) is a
system of rings, each composed of innumerable orbiting objects
ranging in size from the fine particles in cigarette smoke to
small trucks. Like the rings of other planets in the Solar
System, those of Neptune appear to be evanescentfcâa*«*»i-' 4>«»CA.HS
D prnr/as"nc would disrupt them in less than the age of the Solar
System. This suggests that rings were made more or less
"recently" and are not relics from primordial times. But how can
rings be made?
Steeic aie alL.u many moons surrounding the giant planotn, anrV
<wvL.iy nuw and then, by ¿Uidiiufci, one sf tho multitude of eomet-c
bhttt i>wuup through the outer Solar bystem must cullide with-a
s :ne resulting debris — ejected from the moon but
: so fast-moving as to escape from the planet's gravity — may
form, for a time, a new ring en we examine Lhe small luuuns1
e Solar Syctem; wo tind that a number of thorn ha\¿e .-cfâters
alroost^hig f?n°nin fT—the Impact to have fractured
and spl impacts'must have
<¿demelisHeéF::?moons »^—t¿e fragmenta ^f disintegration
parhapa, for a Lime, fOJUUlnu; d ling.
@
["An American Ship. Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 11
• (»s<t4
The American planetary Poiontiat. Eugene Shoemaker, of the
U.S. Geological Survey, proposes that many moons in the outer
Solar System have been annihilated and reformed more than once in
the 4.5 billion years since the Sun and the planets condensed out
of the interstellar gas and dust. The picture that is emerging
from the Voyager sweep through the outer Solar System is of
worlds whose placid and lonely vigils are spasmodically
interrupted by catastrophes from space -- and of worlds reforming
r<c«nsiiVwî'i^ 4-K» »•» Selves
from rings and other debris, .rising like phoenixes from their own
The biggest moon in the Neptune system is called Triton. It

has an atmosphere, somewhat similar to Titan's; but, because the
atmosphere and haze are much thinner, we can see Triton's
surface. He find a wondrously variegated landscape. This is a
world of ice — methane ice, nitrogen ice, probably underlain by
more familiar water ice and rocks. There are impact basins,
which seem to have been flooded by the liquefied ice before
refreezing; impact craters; long crisscrossing valleys; vast
fields of freshly fallen snow; puckered terrain that resembles
the skin of a cantaloupe; and more or less parallel, long, dark
streaks that seem to have been blown by the wind, despite the
+ 1.
thinness of Triton's atmosphere (about 1/10,000th 4»hinnor than
Earth's), i
A
In some places the snow is as bright and white as freshly
fallen Antarctic snows (and may offer a skiing experience
unrivaled in all the Solar System). Elsewhere there is a tint to

the snows, ranging from pink to brown. Here is one possible
explanation: Freshly fallen snows of nitrogen, methane, and
simple hydrocarbons are irradiated by ultraviolet light from the
distant Sun and by electrons trapped in the magnetic field of
Neptune, through which Triton plows. We know from experiments in
our laboratory at Cornell and elsewhere that such irradiation
will convert the snows to complex, dark, reddish organic
sediments — nothing alive, but composed of some of the same
molecules that were involved in the origin of life on Earth some
4 billion years ago.
In local winter, the snows fall from the sky just as on
Earth (although our winters, mercifully, are about 25 times
shorter). Through the spring, they are slowly transformed, more
and more reddish organic molecules building up in them. By
summertime, the snows have evaporated and migrated halfway across
the planet to the winter hemisphere. But the reddish, organic
molecules do not vaporize and are not transported — they are
covered over by new snows, irradiated, and the next summer there
is more and darker lag deposit. As time goes on, substantial
amounts of organic matter are built up on the surface of Triton,
which probably accounts for its variegated color markings.
The streaks begin in small, dark source regions, perhaps
when the warmth of spring and summer heats the volatile snows
below the surface. These vaporize and come pouring out like
["An American Ship. . .: Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 13
geysers, blowing off the less-volatile surface snows and dark

orgánica. Winds at very low speeds carry the dark organics
downwind to create the streaks.
Our understanding of Triton is in its earliest stages, but
it seems very clear that we see, all jumbled together on the same
world, a record of changas o<EB<S^t'l|y u
" fri""1 WJIIJ
I conturiee and, billionfr «*-years.
* * *
The Voyager spacecraft are bound for the stars. They are on
escape trajectories from the Solar System.A Jet almost a million
miles a day, Lhey axe bpuedliuj Luwaid t\m bLara*. The
gravitational fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have
flung them at such high velocities that they are destined
ultimately fco-leavo tho Solar System altogether. Have they left
the Solar System yet? It depends very much on how you define the
boundary of the Seta^-Sâtem. If it's the orbit of the outermost
■big planet, then the Voyager spacecraft have left tnff.finlar
■Syotom; there are nonieptuneg^hat lie undiscovered^ If we mean
the outermost planet, it may be that there are other planets far
beyond Neptune and Pluto; if so, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are
still within the Solar System. If you define the^ bound ciiry of the
Solar System as the heliopause — where the wind from the Sun
gives way to the wind from the stars — then Voyager has not yet
left the Solar System, although it may do so in the next few

decades. But if your definition of the edge of the Solar System
is the place where the Sun's gravity can no longer hold worlds in
orbit about it, then the Voyagers will not leave the Solar System
for millennia. Irt + \S+T< j?i'rft + ''*» »'y> ijLke w le
yj
Weakly held by the Sun's gravity is a: groat,horde of
trillions of comets, in what astronomers call the oort cloud.
Voyager will not pass through the Oort Cloud for another 20,000
years. Then, at last, broken free of the gravitational shackles
that bind her to the Sun, completing her long goodbye to the
Solar System, Voyager will make for the open sea of interstellar
space. Only then will Phase 2 of her mission begin.
These spacecraft will wander for ages in the calm, cold
blackness of interstellar space — where, it turns out, there is
essentially na muuiun. Once out of the Solar System, the
A
surfaces of the spacecraft will remain intact for a billion years

or more, as the Voyagers circumnavigate the center of the Milky
Way galaxy.
We do not know whether there are other spacefaring
civilizations in the Milky Way. And if they do exist, we do not
know how abundant they are. But there is at least a chance that
some time in the remote future one of the Voyagers will be
intercepted and examined by an alien craft.
As each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it
carried along with it a golden phonograph record encased in a
•
golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things:
«I
greetings in 5Ï human languages and one whale language» a 12-
minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG
record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 pictures,
digitally encoded, on our science, our civilization, and
ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits — Eastern
and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant,
a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a
Japanese shakuhachi piece, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky,
Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry .singing "Johnny B. Goode."
Space is so empty that there is virtually no chance that
Voyager will ever enter another solar system, even if every star
in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the
record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily
comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the
contents of the records understood, only if alien beings,
somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of
interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center
of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of
time for the records to be found — if there's anyone out there
to do the finding.
We cannot know how much of the records they would
understand. The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very
different from us — independently evolved on another world. Are
we really sure they could understand our message? Every time I
["An American Ship. Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 16
feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself:

Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Vovaaer record, any
extraterrestrial that finds it will have another standard by
which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their
exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives,
m and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these
robots speak eloquently for us.
But being much better scientists and engineers than we —
otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the
silent spacecraft in interstellar space — perhaps they would
have no difficulty understanding. Perhaps they would recognize
the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our
technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since
launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to
greater things?
Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps
no one in 5 billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion
years is a long time. In 5 billion years, everyone we know and
love will be gone, all humans will have become extinct or evolved
into some other beings, no human artifacts will remain on Earth,
the continents will have been unrecognizably altered or
destroyed, and the Earth itself will have been reduced by the
evolution of the Sun to a charred cinder.
Far from home, untouched by these dioteant events, the
Voyagers will fly on
to r«4«v*w»n < +K S © v»
vy
* * *
[Box:]
"Go, Voyager. Gol"
[Italics:] On Sunday, August 27, 1989, just after Voyager Z

had successfully encountered the Neptune system, the scientists
and engineers at JPL were given a "wrap party." Chuck Berry, one
of the fathers of rock 'n' roll and the only living American
composer to be represented on the Voyager Interstellar Record,
performed a rousing rendition of "Johnny B. Goode" on the^steps
of Building 180, JPL's administrative hub. At tho umue. party,
organincd by Ann Druyan and The PlaneL'aiy Oooioty» I qmrn fhe
^following "Benediction for Voyager 2.": [end of italics]
Every human culture has its rites of passage. They mark the
transition from one stage of life to another. We are gathered
here to celebrate Voyager's rite of passage. A machine designed,
built, and operated here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has
broken free of the Sun's gravity, explored most of the worlds of
the Solar System, and is now on its way to the great, dark ocean
of interstellar space. It carries a phonograph record of
greetings, pictures, and the world's great music to any beings
who might encounter it there.
[Box at end of "Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)] 18
The men and women responsible are gathered here. You are
heroes of human accomplishment. Your deeds will be remembered in
the history books. Our remote descendants may live on some of
the worlds first revealed to us by Voyager. If so, they will
look back on you as we used to look back on Christopher Columbus.
Voyager left a planet blighted and imperiled by nuclear
weapons, climatic change, poverty, and injustice. The species
that launched her was a danger to itself. But Voyager has given
us a stirring cosmic perspective. We have seen evidence of the
destruction and reconstitution of worlds. We have witnessed the
early building blocks of life assembling themselves. But we have
not found a trace, not a hint, of life itself. Voyager reminds
us of the rarity and preciousness of what our planet holds, of
our responsibility to preserve life on Earth.
If we are capable of such grand, long-term, benign,
visionary, high-technology endeavors as Voyager. can we not use
our technological gifts and long-term vision to put this planet
right?
Perhaps the Neptune fly-by marks not just Voyager's rite of
passage but the beginning of our own: the binding up of the
peoples and nations and generations to take care of one another,
to cherish the Earth, and bravely to venture forth — in the
footsteps of Voyager — to the planets and the stars.
[2A, 2/20/93]
The Skies of Other Worlds
The blue of a cloudless May morning, the reds and oranges of

a sunset at sea have roused humans to wonder, to poetry, and to
science. No matter where on Earth we live, no matter what our
language, customs, or society, we share a sky in common. Most of
us expect that cerulean blue and would be stunned to wake up one
sunrise to find a cloudless sky that was black or green.
(Inhabitants of Los Angeles and Denver recently have grown
accustomed to brown skies, and the citizens of Seattle and
Buffalo have long been used to gray ones — but even they still
consider blue to be the planetary norm.)
And yet there are worlds with black or green skies, and the
color of the sky characterizes the world. Plop me down on any
planet in the Solar System, let me — without sensing the
gravity, without glimpsing the ground — take a quick look at the
Sun and sky, and I can pretty much tell you where I am. That
familiar shade of blue, Interrupted here and there by fleecy
white clouds, is a signature of our world. If there ever is a
true flag of Earth, this should be its color.
Birds fly through it, clouds are suspended in it, humans
admire and routinely traverse it at almost the speed of sound.
Light from the Sun and stars flutters through it. But what is
the sky? What is it made of? How much of it is there? Where
does all that blue come from? If it is a commonplace for all
humans, if it typifies our world, surely we should know something
["The Skies of Other Worlds" (2A, 2/20/93)]
about it. What is the sky?

In August 1957, for the first time, a human being got above
the blue and looked around -- when David Simons, a retired Air
Force officer and physician, became the highest human in history.
He piloted a balloon to an altitude of over 100,000 feet (30
kilometers) and through his windows glimpsed a different sky.
Now a professor at the university of California Medical School in
Irvine, Dr. Simons recalls a dark, deep purple sky. He had
reached the transition region in the atmosphere where the blue of
ground level is being overtaken by the perfect black of space.
Since Simons' almost forgotten flight, people of many
nations have flown above the atmosphere. It is now clear from
repeated and direct human (and robotic) experience that in space
the daytime sky is black. The Sun shines brightly on your
spaceship. The Earth below you is brilliantly illuminated. But
the sky above is black as night.
Clearly, the daylight sky — all that blue — is somehow
connected with the air. If you look more closely at the Earth
from space, you see it surrounded by a thin band of blue. It's
as thick as the lower atmosphere; indeed, it is the lower
atmosphere. At the top of that band you can see the sky fading
into the blackness of space. This is the transition zone that
Simons entered.
We see the blue in daylight because sunlight is bouncing off
the air around and above us. On a cloudless and moonless night,
["The Skies of Other Worlds" (2A, 2/20/93)] 3
G the sky is black because there is no sufficiently intense source
of light to be reflected off the air. Somehow, the air
preferentially bounces blue light down to us. How?
The light from the Sun comes in many colors -- violet, blue,
green, yellow, orange, red, corresponding to light of different
wavelengths. (A wavelength, we recall, is the distance from
crest to crest as the wave travels through air or space.) Violet
and blue light have the shortest wavelengths; orange and red
light have the longest wavelengths. What we perceive as color is
how our eyes and brains read the wavelengths of light. (We might
just as naturally read wavelengths of light as, say, heard
musical tones rather than seen colors ~ but that's not how our
senses evolved.)
When all those rainbow colors of the spectrum are mixed
together, as in sunlight, they seem almost white. These
different wavelengths travel together in 8 minutes across the
intervening 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) of space
between the Sun and Earth. The lightwaves hit the atmosphere,
which is made mostly of nitrogen and oxygen molecules. Some
waves are reflected by the air back into space, and some are
bounced around in the air before the light reaches the ground,
where they can be detected by a passing eyeball. This bouncing
around of lightwaves in the atmosphere is called "scattering."
But not all waves are egually scattered by the molecules of
air. Wavelengths that are much longer than the size of the
molecules are scattered less. Wavelengths that are closer to the

size of the molecules are scattered more. (You can see the same
thing in water waves scattered by the pilings of piers). The
shorter wavelengths — those that we sense as violet and blue
light -- are more efficiently scattered than the longer
wavelengths ~ those that we sense as orange and red light. When
we look up on a cloudless day and see the blue sky, we are
witnessing the preferential scattering of the short waves in
sunlight. This is called Rayleigh scattering, after the English
physicist who offered the first coherent explanation of it.
Cigarette smoke is blue for just the same reason: The particles
that make it up are about as small as the wavelength of blue
light.
The red of the sunset is what's left of sunlight after the
blue is scattered away. Since the atmosphere is a thin shell of
gas surrounding the solid Earth, sunlight must pass through a
longer path of air at sunset (or sunrise) than at noon. Since
the violet and blue waves are scattered even more efficiently
during their now-longer path through the air, what we see when we
look toward the Sun are the other waves of sunlight — the ones
not efficiently scattered — especially the oranges and reds. A
blue sky makes a red sunset. (The Sun at noon seems yellowish
partly because it puts out slightly more yellow light, and partly
because some blue light is scattered out of the sunbeams.)
It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that

their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery.
But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works
— that white light is made of colors, that color measures '
-f-U ¡mm »fi k v/# y+ ¿»w ^4 K *"Ç l/^W,
■lightwaves, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing
it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for
the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the
romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
Since most simple molecules are about the same size (roughly
a hundred millionth of an inch), the blue of the Earth's sky
doesn't much depend on what the air is made of — as long as the
air doesn't absorb the light. Oxygen and nitrogen molecules
don't absorb visible light; they only bounce it away in some
other direction. But other molecules gobble up the light.
Oxides of nitrogen — produced in automotive engines and in the
fires of industry — are a source of the murky brown coloration
of smog. Oxides of nitrogen (made from oxygen and nitrogen) do
absorb light. Absorption, as well as scattering, can color a
sky.
So now let's take a quick survey of the daytime skies of
some other worlds in our Solar System. The planet Mercury, the
Earth's Moon, and many other natural satellites going around the
planets are small worlds; and, with little gravity, they are
unable to retain their atmospheres — which instead trickle off
into space. The near vacuum of space then reaches the ground.
["The Skies of Other Worlds" (2À, 2/20/93)]
Light from the sun strikes their surfaces unimpeded, neither

scattered nor absorbed along the way. Their skies are black,
even in full daylight. In the Solar System, all moons have black
skies (except Titan of Saturn and perhaps Triton of Neptune,
which are big moons with atmospheres), and all asteroids as well.
Venus has about 100 times more air than Earth. The air
isn't mainly oxygen and nitrogen as here ~ it's carbon dioxide.
But carbon dioxide doesn't absorb visible light either. What
would the sky look like from the surface of Venus if Venus had no
clouds? With so much atmosphere in the way, not only would
violet and blue waves be scattered but all the other colors as
well — green, yellow, orange, red. But the air is so thick that
blue light never makes it to the ground; it is scattered back by
successive bounces higher up. Thus, the light that does reach
the ground should be strongly reddened -- like an Earth sunset
all over the sky. Sulfur in the high clouds will slightly yellow
this color. Pictures taken by the Soviet Venera landers confirm
that the skies of Venus are orange.
Mars is a different story. It is a smaller world than
Earth, with a much thinner atmosphere. In fact, the pressure at
the surface of Mars is about that at the altitude in the Earth's
stratosphere to which Simons rose. So we might expect the
Martian sky to be purple-black. The first color picture from
Mars was obtained by the American Viking 1 lander in July 1976 —
the first spacecraft successfully to touch down on the surface of
the Red Planet. The digital data were dutifully radioed from
Mars back to Earth, where the color picture was assembled by
computer. To the surprise of all the scientists and nobody else,
the first picture released showed the Martian sky to be a
comfortable, homey blue — impossible for a planet with so
insubstantial an atmosphere. Something had clearly gone wrong.
The picture on your color television set is a mixture of
three monotone images, each in a different color of light — red,
green, and blue. To get the right color, you or your set needs
to mix or balance these three images correctly. If you turn up
the intensity of, say, blue, the picture will eventually appear
too blue. Any picture returned from space requires similar color
balance. Considerable discretion is sometimes left to the
computer analysts in deciding this balance. The Viking analysts
were not planetary astronomers, and with this first color picture
from Mars they simply mixed the colors until it looked "right."
We are so conditioned by our experience on Earth that "right," of
course, means a blue sky. The color of the picture was soon
corrected ~ under the supervision of James B. Pollack of NASA's
Ames Research Center, using color calibration standards onboard
the spacecraft — and the resulting picture showed no blue sky at
all but rather something between ochre and pink. Again, hardly
purple-black. [Duplicate of Cosmos?]
But this is the right color of the Martian sky. Much of the
surface of Mars is desert ~ and red because the sands are rusty.
There are occasional violent sandstorms, which lift fine

particles from the surface high into the atmosphere. It takes a
long time for the particles to fall out, and before the sky has
cleaned itself, there is another sandstorm. Since rusty
particles are always suspended in this sky, future generations of
humans, born and living out their lives on Mars, will consider
that salmon color to be as natural and familiar as we consider
our homey blue. (And, from a single glance at the sky, they'll
probably be able to tell how long it has been since the last big
sandstorm.)
The planets in the outer part of the Solar System —
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — are of a different sort.
These are huge worlds with giant atmospheres made mainly of
hydrogen and helium. Their solid surfaces are so deep inside
that no sunlight penetrates there at all. Down there, the sky is
black, but with no promise of a sunrise — a perpetual starless
night, perhaps illuminated on occasion by a bolt of lightning.
But higher in the atmosphere, where the sunlight reaches, a much
more interesting vista awaits. On Jupiter, above a high-altitude
haze layer composed of ammonia (rather than water) ice particles,
the sky is blue-black. Farther down, in the blue sky region, are
gorgeous multicolored clouds of unknown composition. (The
candidate materials include sulfur, phosphorus, and complex
organic molecules.) Still farther down, the sky will appear red-
brown, except that these clouds are of varying thickness, and
'/'D
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert P into "Skies of Other Worlds," last page (p. 9):

Uranus and especially Neptune have an uncanny, austere blue color
through which clouds ~ some of them a little whiter — are
carried by high-speed winds on these worlds.
r,.o
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert Q into "Skies of Other Worlds," last page (p. 9):

The conventional understanding is that the absorption by methane
and the scattering of sunlight by the deep atmosphere accounts
for the blue colors on these planets. But recent analyses of
Voyager data show these causes to be insufficient. Apparently
very deep — maybe in the vicinity of the hypothesized clouds of
hydrogen sulfide — there is an abundant blue substance. So far
no one has been able to figure out what it might be. Again, blue
materials are quite rare in Nature. As always happens in
science, as the old mysteries are dispelled, new ones arise. But
sooner or later we'll find out the answer to this one, too.
O*'*** s l Ut*. ciir#<H«y ktrt ^
["The Skies of Other Worlds" (2A, 2/20/93)] 9
where they are very thin, you might see a patch of blue. Still
deeper, we approach perpetual night. Something similar is true
on Saturn, but the colors there «re much more muted.
sunlight reaches a comparatively clean atmosphere
composed mainly of hydrogen and helium but also rich in methane.
Long paths of methane absorb yellow and especially red light and
let the green and blue ligh*-JEil£er through. A thin hydrocarbon
haze removes a little blueT * Co thoTokics of Uranus age blue»-
green-;—flf NrpMilH'j I In "ni nrn are similiir, îf ^perOT>
It is now almost possible to assign color combinations —
based on the hues of clouds and sky -- to every planet in the
Solar System. Perhaps they will one day adorn the flags of
distant human outposts, when the new frontiers are sweeping
toward the stars.
[2A, 2/20/93]
Volcanos of Other Worlds
All over the world, you can find a kind of mountain with one
striking and unusual feature. Any child can recognize it: The
top seems squared off. If you climb to the summit or fly over
it, you discover that the mountain has a hole or crater at its
peak. In some mountains of this sort, the craters are small; in
others, they are almost as large as the mountain itself.
Occasionally, the craters are filled with water. Sometimes
they're filled with a more amazing liquid: You tiptoe to the
edge, and see vast, glowing lakes and fountains of fire within
the crater interior. These holes in the tops of mountains are
called calderas, after the word "caldron," and the mountains on
which they sit are known, of course, as volcanos, after Vulcan,
the Roman god of fire.
A typical volcanic mountain looks safe enough. Vegetation
runs up its sides. Hamlets or shrines nestle at its base.
Terraced fields may decorate its flanks. And yet, without
warning, after centuries of lassitude, the mountain may explode
and rivers of molten rock come pouring down its sides. The
eruptions of Mt. St. Helens or Mt. Pinatubo are recent reminders,
but examples can be found throughout history. In 1902, a hot,
glowing volcanic cloud swept «££ Mt. Pelée and killed 30,000
people in the city of St. Pierre in the Caribbean island of
Martinique. The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in the first century
buried in ash the hapless inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum
["Voléanos of Other Worlds" (2A, 2/20/93)] 2
f
and killed the naturalist Pliny the Elder as he sot out to '
s »^«
*?vr-lrrQ ^*"g ^y*-»-1-^*-^ The Mediterranean island of Santoriivis c,r4;^
in reality the only part above water of the rim of a volcano now
inundated by the sea. The explosion of the Santorin, volcano in
the late fifteenth century B.C. may, some think, have destroyed
the great Minoan civilization on the nearby island of Crete and
changed the balance of power in early classical civilization.
Really major volcanic explosions can punch enormous
guantities of matter — mainly fine droplets of sulfuric acid —
into the stratosphere. There, they reflect sunlight back to
space and cool the Earth. This has happened recently with Mt.
Pinatubo, and disastrously in 1815-16 after the eruption of the
Indonesian volcano Mt. Tambora, which resulted in the dioaotroufi
famine-ridden "year without a summer." Studies of volcanic
effects on the climate have led to the discovery of nuclear
winter and provide important tests of our ability to use
sophisticated computer models to predict future climate change.
Voléanos have naturally been regarded with fear and awe.
When medieval Christians viewed the eruption of Mt. Hekla in
Iceland and saw churning fragments of soft lava suspended over
the volcano, they imagined they were seeing the souls of the
damned awaiting entrance into Hell. Indeed, the glowing red
lakes and sulfurous gases within the summit caldera of Hekla were
once thought to be a real glimpse into the underworld and a
confirmation of folk beliefs in Hell (and, fey oymmotry, in
hl\
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert P into "Voléanos of Other Worlds," revision 2A, p. 3:

Once the volcano is fully built, the molten lava no longer
spewing up into the caldera, then it becomes just like any other
mountain, slowly eroding because of rainfall and windblown debris
and, eventually, the movement of continental plates across the
Earth's surface. "How many years can a mountain exist before it
is washed to the sea?" asked Bob Dylan in the ballad "Blowing in
the Wind." The answer depends on which planet we're talking
about. For the Earth, it's about ten million years.
["Voléanos of Other Worlds" (2A, 2/20/93)]
Heaven).
A volcano is, in fact, an aperture to an underground-i*nd r«*fn»
/,
much vaster than the surface of the Earth ~ and far more
hostile. The lava that erupts from a volcano is liquid rock —
rock raised to its melting point, generally around 1000'C. The
lava emerges from a hole in the Earth; as it cools and
solidifies, it generates and then remakes the flanks of a
volcanic mountain. This observation implies that the interior of
the Earth is extremely hot. Indeed, seismic evidence shows that,
only a few hundred kilometers beneath the surface, the entire
Earth is at least slightly molten. The interior of the Earth is
hot, in part, because radioactive elements there, such as
uranium, give off heat as they decay; and partly because the
Earth retains some of the original heat formed in its formation,
when many small worlds fell together by their mutual gravity to
make the Earth.
The molten rock, or magma, rises through fissures in the
surrounding heavier solid rocks. We can imagine vast
subterranean caverns filled with glowing, red, hot, bubbling,
viscous liquids that shoot up toward the surface if a suitable
channel is by chance provided. The magma, called lava as it
pours out of the summit caldera, does indeed arise from the
unde rworidT
CíTTíóvember 1971, NASA's Mariner 9 arrived at Mars to find
the planet completely obscured by a global dust storm. Almost
the only features to be seen on Mars were four circular spots

rising out of the reddish murk. But there was something peculiar
about them: They had holes in them. As the storm cleared, we
were able to see quite unambiguously that we had been viewing
four huge volcanic mountains penetrating through the dust, each
capped by a great summit caldera.
After the storm had dissipated, the true scale of these
volcanos became clear. The largest — appropriately named
Olympus Mons, or Mt. Olympus, after the home of the Greek gods —
is more than 25 kilometers (roughly 15 miles) high, dwarfing not
only the largest volcanic mountain on the Earth but also the
largest mountain of any sort, Mt. Everest, which stands 9
kilometers above the Tibetan plateau. There are about 20 large
volcanos on Mars, but none so massive as Olympus Mons, with a
volume about 100 times greater than that of the largest volcano
on Earth, Mauna Loa in Hawaii.
By counting impact craters (made by small impacting
asteroids, and very different from summit calderas) on the flanks
of the volcanos, estimates of their ages can be derived. Some
Martian volcanos turn out to be a few billion years old, although
none dates back to the very origin of Mars, about 4.5 billion
years ago. But some, including Olympus Mons, are comparativeU
youngctorc — perhaps a few hundred million years old. It is
clear that enormous volcanic explosions occurred early in Martian
history, providing, perhaps, an atmosphere much denser than the
["Voléanos of Other Worlds" (2A, 2/20/93)] 5
one Mars holds today. What would the planet have looked like if
we could have visited it then?
It is, I suppose, even possible ~ although there is no
evidence either way — that Olympus Mons, the largest volcano we
know about for certain in the Solar System, will again one day be
active. Volcanologists, a patient sort, would doubtless welcome
the event.
In 1990-92 [check] the Magellan spacecraft returned
astonishing data about the landforms of Venus. In a near-polar
orbit, Magellan's radar waves penetrated the cloud, reached the
surface, reflected back to space, and were recorded by Magellan
before the data were relayed back to Earth. From these data,
maps of almost the entire planet, with resolutions better [check]
than 1 kilometer, were obtained. Much of the geology of Venus is
unlike anything seen on Earth or anywhere else. Planetary
geologists give these landforms names, but that doesn't mean we
understand how they're formed.
The surface temperature of Venus is almost 470 *C (900°F) —
which means that the rocks on Venus are much closer to their
melting points than are the rocks at the surface of the Earth.
The temperature bousL vuu must -gk^ from below to ««jit surface
rocks is much less than on Earth. Although some large volcanic
forms seem to have been discovered, the entire surface of Venus
is, in a sense, volcanic terrain — formed from molten rock.
(But you could also say this about the Earth, because a mighty
[3-23-93.atl]
Insert B into "Voléanos of Other Worlds":

9KThe ij
surface of Venus as revealed by Magellan -was very young.
There are so few impact craters that everything older than about
500 million years must have been wiped out,. There is only one
plausible agent of erosion: vulcanisa. All over the planet
there are craters, mountains, and other geological features that
have been inundated by seas of lava^ welling up from the inside,
inundating—pro-cxisting features and then freez-tng solid. Some
scientists believe that until about 500 million years ago the
surface of Venus was almost entirely devoid of any landforms.
Streams and oceans of molten rock were pouring out of the
interior all over the planet, filling in and covering over all
relief. Had you plummeted down through the clouds in that
nt time, the surface would have been pretty uniform,/at
ancient
nighttime glowing everywhere from the red heat of molten lava.
In this view the great internal heat engine of Venus, which
supplied copious amounts of magma to the surface until about 500
million years ago, has now turned off. The heat engine has run
down.
plate tectonic engine has formed the continents out of the near-
mo] m interior [check].)
3L-WÜ-S¡ven more unexpected than the great Martian voléanos or the
surface of Venus is what awaited us when the Voyager 1 spacecraft
encountered Io, the innermost of the four large moons of Jupiter,
in March 1979. There we found a strange, small, multicolored
world positively awash in voléanos. As we watched in
astonishment, eight active plumes poured gas and fine particles
up into the sky. The largest, now called Pele, projected a
fountain of material 300 kilometers into space. By the time
Voyager 2 arrived at Io, four months later, Pele had turned
itself off, but six of the other plumes were still active, at
least one new plume had been discovered, and another caldera,
named Surt, had changed its color dramatically.
The colors on the surface of Io, even though exaggerated in
NASA's color-enhanced images, are like none elsewhere in the
Solar System. The currently favored explanation is that the
volcanos of Io are driven not by upwelling molten rock, as on the
Earth, but by upwelling sulfur dioxide and molten sulfur.
Various forms and compounds of sulfur have indeed been detected
on the surface of Io and in nearby space — the volcanos blow
some of the sulfur off Io altogether. These findings have
suggested to some an underground sea of liquid sulfur that issues
to the surface at points of weakness, generates a shallow
volcanic mound, trickles downhill, and freezes, its final color
determined by Its temperature when it erupted.

There are places on Mars that have changed very little in a
billion years. On Io, in a century, much of the surface will be
reflooded, filled in or washed away by new volcanic flows. Maps
of Io become quickly obsolete.
A volcano, in one sense, represents the insides of a planet
gushing out, a wound that eventually heals itself by cooling.
But different worlds have different insides. The discovery of
liquid-sulfur vulcanism on Io was a little like finding that an
old acquaintance, when cut, bleeds green blood. You had no idea
such differences were possible. We are naturally eager to find
additional signs of vulcanism on other worlds. On Europa, the
second of the large moons of Jupiter, while there are no volcanic
mountains at all, molten ice — liquid water — seems to have
gushed to the surface through an enormous number of crisscrossing
dark markings before freezing. The satellite's surface
temperature is near -150"C, the Sun being 25 times dimmer at
Europa than at Earth. Among the moons of Saturn, we have seen
signs that liquid water has gushed up from the interior, wiping
away impact craters, although we have never seen anything that
might plausibly be an ice volcano in either the Jupiter or Saturn
systems.
The volcanos of other worlds provide a stirring spectacle.
They enhance our sense of wonder, our joy in the beauty and
diversity of the cosmos. But these exotic volcanos perform
["Volcanos of Other Worlds" (2A, 2/20/93)]
another service as well: They help us to understand better the

volcanos of our own world. When we discover vast volcanic
eminences on a geologically quiet Mars; when we find an object
melted not by the heat of radioactive decay, as on Earth, but by
gravitational tides exerted by nearby worlds; when we find sulfur
rather than silicate vulcanism; and when we begin to wonder, out
in the Saturn system, whether we night be viewing a kind of water
or ammonia vulcanism — then we are learning what else is
possible. Knowing the alternatives is a help if you have any
«nid unJ impiuv^ your own neighborhood.
[2A, 2/20/93]
Waves
You're sitting in the bathtub, and the faucet is dripping.

Once every second, say, a drop falls into the tub and generates a
little wave that spreads out in a circle. You watch as it
approaches the sides of the tub, and note that it's reflected
back into the water. But now the wave is weaker, and after one
or two more reflections, you can't make it out anymore. New
waves are arriving at your end of the tub, each generated by
another drip of the faucet. The "frequency" of the waves is
simply how often they pass your vantage point — in this case,
3Tj*s "4-^* *•*•• •» 4-1** JT\ç r***.
one wave every second. -The "wavelength" of the waves is simply
the distance between successive wave crests — in this case,
maybe [check] 10 centimeters (about 4 inches). But if a wave
passes every second, and they are ten centimeters apart, the
speed of the waves is 10 centimeters per second. The speed of a
wave, you conclude, is the frequency times the wavelength.
Bathtub waves and ocean waves are two-dimensional waves;
they spread out as circles on the surface of the water. Sound
waves, on the other hand, are three-dimensional waves, spreading
out in the air in all directions from the source of the sound.
In the wave crest, the air is compressed a little; in its wake,
the air is a little less dense. Your ear detects these waves.
The more often they come (the higher the frequency), the higher
is the pitch you hear.
Musical tones are only a matter of how often the sound waves
["Waves" (2A, 2/20/93)]
■trike your ears. Middle C is how we describe 263 sound waves

reaching us every second. What would be the wavelength of Middle
C? If sound waves were directly visible, how far would it be
from crest to crest? At sea level, sound travels at about 340
meters per second (about 700 miles per hour). Just as in the
bathtub, the wavelength will be the speed of the wave divided by
its frequency, or about 1.3 meters for Middle C -- the height of
a ten-year-old [check].
The human ear is not a perfect detector of sound waves.
There are frequencies (fewer than 20 waves arriving per second)
that are too low for us to hear, although whales communicate
readily with such low tones. Likewise, there are frequencies
(more than 20,000 waves arriving every second) that are too high-
pitched for human adults to detect, although dogs have no
difficulty (and respond when called by a whistle at such
frequencies). There are realms of sound — a million waves per
second, say — that are, and always will be, unknown to direct
human perception. Our sense organs, as superbly adapted as they
are, have fundamental limitations.
Light waves are similar to sound waves. They are three-
dimensional, have a frequency, a wavelength, and a speed (the
speed of light). But, astonishingly, they do not require a
medium, like water or air, to propagate in. Light reaches us
from the Sun and the distant stars, even though the intervening
space is a nearly perfect vacuum. In space, astronauts without a
["Waves" (2A, 2/20/93)]
radio link cannot hear each other, even if they are a few
centimeters apart. But they can see one another perfectly well.
Take away all the air in your room and you will be unable to hear
an acquaintance complain about it, although you will have no
difficulty seeing him flailing and gasping.
For ordinary visible light — the kind our eyes are
sensitive to — the frequency is very high, about 600 trillion
waves striking your eyeballs every second. [Because the speed of
light is 30 billion centimeters a second (186,000 miles per
second), the wavelength of visible light is about 0.00005
centimeters — much too small for us to see if the waves
themselves were somehow illuminated.]
Just as different frequencies of sound are perceived by
humans as different musical tones, so different frequencies of
light are perceived as different colors. Red light has a
frequency of about 460 trillion waves per second, and violet
light about 710 trillion waves per second. Between them are the
familiar colors of the rainbow. Every frequency corresponds to a
color. Just as there are sounds too high-pitched and too low-
pitched for us to hear, so there are frequencies of light, or
colors, outside our range of vision. They extend to much higher
frequencies (around a billion billion [I know, I know. I can't
help it. That's how many there are.] waves per second for gamma
rays) and to much lower frequencies (less than one wave per
second for long radio waves). Running through the spectrum of
["Waves" (2A, 2/20/93)] 4
#
light from high freguency to low freguency are broad swaths
called gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light,
infrared light, and radio waves. These are all waves that travel
through a vacuum. Each is as legitimate a kind of light as
ordinary visible light is. We are prejudiced towards visible
light, because that's the only kind of light to which our eyes
are sensitive. But if our bodies could transmit and receive
radio waves, early humans might have been able to communicate
with each other over great distances; if the same were true of X-
rays, our ancestors might have peered usefully into the hidden
interiors of plants, people, other animals, and minerals. So why
didn't we evolve eyes sensitive to these other freguencies of
light?
Any material you choose likes to absorb light of certain
frequencies, but not others. A different substance has a
different preference. There is a natural resonance between light
and chemistry. Some freguencies, like gamma rays, are
indiscriminately gobbled up by virtually all materials. If you
had a gamma ray flashlight, the light would travel about the
length of a football field before being mostly absorbed by the
air along its path. So gamma rays from space, traversing a much
longer path through the Earth's atmosphere, would be entirely
absorbed before they reached the surface of the Earth. Down here
on Earth, it's very dark in gamma rays. If you want to see gamma
rays from the center of the Galaxy, say, you must move your
["Waves" (2A, 2/20/93)]
instruments into space. Something similar is true for X-rays,

ultraviolet light, and most infrared frequencies.
On the other hand, most materials absorb visible light much
less efficiently. Air, for example, is generally transparent to
visible light. So one reason ve see at visible frequencies is
that this kind of light gets through the atmosphere. Gamma ray
eyes would be of limited use in an atmosphere which makes things
pitch black in gamma rays. Natural selection knows better.
The other reason we see in visible light is because that's
where the Sun puts out most of its energy. A very hot star emits
most of its energy in the ultraviolet. A very cool star puts out
most of its energy in the infrared. But the Sun, in many
respects an average star, puts out most of its energy in the
visible. Indeed, to remarkably high precision, the human eye is
most sensitive at the exact frequency in the yellow part of the
spectrum where the Sun is brightest.
Might the beings of some other planet see at some very
different frequencies? This seems not at all likely. Virtually
all cosmically abundant gases tend to be transparent in the
visible and opaque at nearby frequencies. Virtually all stars
put out a significant amount, if not most, of their energy at
visible frequencies. There might be occasional exceptions, but
in general the beings of other worlds will probably see at very
much the same frequencies as we do.
["Waves" (2A, 2/20/93)]
Grass absorbs red and blue light, reflects green light, and
so appears green to us. We could draw a picture of how much
light is reflected at different colors. Something that absorbs
blue and reflects red light appears to us red; something that
absorbs red light and reflects blue appears to us blue. We see
an object as white when it reflects light roughly equally in
different colors. But this is also true of gray materials and
black materials. The difference between black and white is not
one of color, but one of how much light they reflect. The terms
are relative, not absolute. Perhaps the brightest natural **bjuirt
£word?] is freshly fallen snow. But it only reflects about 75
percent of the sunlight falling on it. Perhaps the darkest
material that we come into contact with — black velvet, say —
reflects only a few percent of the light that falls on it. "As
different as black and white" is a conceptual error: Black and
white are fundamentally the same thing; the difference is only in
the relative amounts of light reflected, not in their color.
Surprisingly, this fact seems to be commemorated in some
languages. "Black" derives from the Anglo-Saxon blaece. and
"white" from the nearly identical Anglo-Saxon blac (for example,
"bleach," "bleak," "blanch," "blank," and the French "blanc").
[Check not word-for-word from Dragons of Eden.]
White and black are relative terms. Among humans, most
"whites" are not as white as a white refrigerator and most
"blacks" are not as black as black velvet. The amount of light
["Waves" (2A, 2/20/93)]
that human skin reflects (the reflectivity) varies widely from

individual to individual. Skin pigmentation is produced mainly
by an organic molecule called melanin, which the body
manufactures from tyrosine, an amino acid common in proteins. In
the United States there are very few people whose skin is
actually white or black; almost everyone's skin color is brown,
reflecting somewhat more light towards the red end of the
spectrum than towards the blue. It makes no more sense to call
individuals with high melanin contents "colored" than it does to
describe individuals with low melanin contents "bleached."
Albinos suffer from a hereditary disease in which melanin is not
made; their skin and hair are milky white, and the irises of
their eyes are pink. Albino animals are rare in Nature because
their skins provide little protection against solar radiation,
and because they lack protective camouflage.
It is only at visible and immediately adjacent frequencies
that any significant differences in skin reflectivity exist.
People of Northern European ancestry and people of Central
African ancestry are equally black in the ultraviolet and in the
infrared, where almost all organic molecules, not just melanin,
absorb much of the light that falls on them. Only in the
visible, where many molecules are transparent, is the anomaly of
white skin even possible. Over most of the spectrum, all humans
are black.
["Waves" (2A, 2/20/93)] 8
Sunlight is composed of a mixture of waves with frequencies

corresponding to all the colors in the visible spectrum. There
is slightly more yellow light than red or blue light, which is
partly why the Sun looks yellow. All of these colors fall on,
say, the petal of a rose. So why does the rose look red?
Because all colors other than red are preferentially absorbed in
the petal. The mixture of lightwaves strikes the rose and the
waves are bounced around helter skelter below the surface of the
petal. As with a surface wave in the bathtub, after every bounce
the wave is weaker. But blue and yellow waves are absorbed at
each reflection more than red waves. The net result after many
reflections is that more red light is reflected back to the
observer's eye than any other color, and we perceive the beauty
of a red rose. In blue or violet flowers exactly the same thing
happens, except now red and yellow light is preferentially
absorbed after the multiple reflections and blue or violet light
is preferentially reflected.
There's a particular organic pigment responsible for the
absorption of light in such flowers as roses and violets. It's
called anthocyanin. Remarkably, a typical anthocyanin is red
when placed in acid, blue when placed in an alkaline solution,
and violet when placed in water. Thus, roses are red because
they contain anthocyanin and are slightly acid; violets are blue
because they also contain anthocyanin and they are not acidic.
(I've been trying to use these facts in a bit of doggerel, but
["Waves" (2A, 2/29/93)] 9
%
with no success.)
Blue pigments are generally rare in nature. The rarity of
blue rocks on Earth, and blue surface material on other planets,
is an illustration of this fact. Blue pigments have to be fairly
complicated; the anthocyanins are composed of about 20 atoms
heavier than hydrogen arranged in a particular pattern.
The major evolutionary reason for the coloration of flowers
is to attract pollinating insects. The colors of the rose and
the violet are there for sexual reasons. But not all the action
is going on in the visible part of the spectrum, because
pollinating insects ~ bees, for example — are also sensitive at
ultraviolet frequencies where humans cannot see. In the near-
ultraviolet, many flowers have garish patterns to attract insects
— the equivalent of signs saying "free eats" or "bees welcome."
[Duplicated?]
Living things have inventively put color to use — to absorb
sunlight and, through photosynthesis, to make food out of air and
water; to remind mother birds where the gullets of their
fledglings are; to interest a mate; to attract a pollinating
insect; for camouflage and disguise; and, at least in humans, out
of a delight in beauty. But all this is possible only because of
the physics of stars, the chemistry of air, and the elegant
machinery of the evolutionary process which has brought us into
such superb harmony with our physical environment.
[2A, 2/20/93]
The Man in the Moon
Today we know the Moon as a place, a small world, rocky,

cratered, airless, and waterless, that has actually been trod by
humans. But for most of history ~ before spacecraft, before
telescopes, before we had begun to emerge from magical thinking
— the Moon was an enigma with a function. (In an old Persian
story, a wise man is asked which is more useful, the Sun or the
Moon. "The Moon," he answers, "because the Sun shines in the
daytime, when it's light out anyway.") The Moon's waxing and
waning — from crescent to full to crescent to new — was widely
understood as a celestial metaphor of death and rebirth. It was
connected with the reproductive cycle of women, which has very
closely the same period — as the word "menstruation" (Latin
mensis ■ month) reminds us. Almost no one knew that the Moon was
a world.
What do we actually see when we look up at the Moon with the
naked eye? We see a configuration of irregular bright and dark
markings — not a close representation of any familiar object.
However, if we examine world myth and folklore, we find many
images ¿roaginad to .aatiot in the Moon: a woman weaving, an
elephant jumping off a cliff, a girl with a basket on her back, a
rabbit, a woman pounding tapa cloth.
But the most common image by far is the Man in the Moon,.
TU
whose associated folklore depicts the Moon net as something
t\ •+■
mysterious but r-athor as comething prosaic. In children's books
["The Man in the Noon" (2A, 2/20/93)]
and elsewhere, the Man in the Moon is often drawn simply as a

face set in a circle, not too different from the bland "happy
face" of two dots and an upturned are. that one ares on metal ■—
butt on J ill il i ililltrn h y rftrpnrriT Inn -Irin^ +•" j™y««"* »!*■<■■
public ImaytfT1 You need only look up at night, though, to see
that there is little similarity to a face.

Consider the two regions of the Moon that we see with the
naked eye. One is the brighter forehead, cheeks, and chin; the
other is the darker eyes and mouth. The former — when we

examine it to much higher precision than we possibly can with the
naked eye — turns out to be the ancient, cratered highlands,

dating back to almost 4.5 billion years. The dark features are
younger flows of basaltic lava that welled up a few hundred

million years after the Moon was formed, many of them as a result
of the impacts of enormous asteroids or comets. The Man in the

Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes — all of which
occurred before humans, before mammals, before vertebrates, and
possibly before life on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of
our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.

But why should cultures all over the world, probably for
most of human history, put a man in the Moo» when there is none
there?
Humans, like other primates, are a gregarious lot. We enjoy
one another's company. We're mammals, and parental care for the
young is essential for the continuance of the species. Infants

["The Man in the Moon" (2A, 2/20/93)]
readily recognise human faces soon after birth. The parent

smiles at the child, the child smiles back, and an essentiel bond
is enhanced. By the time we grow up, we have seen an enormous
number of faces and are keenly attuned to them.
But this has an inadvertent consequence, because the
pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in
extracting a face from a clutter of other details that we
sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble
disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to
see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. There are many
others.
Sometimes it's a geological formation, such as the Old Man
of the Mountain in New Hampshire. We recognize that this is not
some supernatural sculpture but the consequence of erosion and
collapse of a rock face. Anyway, it doesn't look much like a
face anymore.
Occasionally, a vegetable or a pattern of wood grain or the
hide of a cow resembles a human face. There is a celebrated
eggplant that closely resembles Richard Nixon (see illustration).
But few of us deduce from this divine or extraterrestrial
intervention. We recognize that there are large numbers of
eggplants in the world and that, if there are enough of them,
sooner or later we will come upon one that looks a little- like a
human face.
When the face is of a religious personage ~ as, for

example, a tortilla purported to exhibit the face of Jesus (see
illustration) -- then thoro ig usually a pauoe boforo pronounoing
judgment» Still, it seems unlikely that a miracle is being
worked on so evanescent a medium, and, considering how many
tortillas have been pounded out since the beginning of the world,
it would be surprising if a few didn't -look vaguely familiar^
(These cases are very different from that of the so-called Shroud
of Turin, which shows something too close to a human form to be a
natural object misapprehended and which is now proved to be not
the death shroud of Jesus, but a pious hoax from the fourteenth
century, a time when the manufacture of fraudulent religious
relics was a thriving home handicraft industry.)
In our day, the most arresting of such discoveries accompany
the spacecraft exploration of other worlds. Around the time of
the Apollo lunar landings, many non-experts — amateur
astronomers, flying saucer zealots, and writers for aerospace
magazines — pored jyin/nn eovi-euL spellllig ujç (dsmiting—
,Amor. Hm. Diet.-leiuallia oui arbitérn over the photographs,
searching for anomalies that NASA scientists and astronauts had
overlooked. Soon there were reports of enormous Latin letters
and Arabic numerals inscribed on the lunar surface, pyramids,
highways, crosses, glowing UFOs, and, it was ominously asserted,
the long shadows of ballistic missiles, probably Soviet, aimed at
Earth. All have turned out to be natural lunar geological
5
#
formations misunderstood by the analysts, internal reflections in
hand-held cameras, and the like.
The experience provides fair warning that, for a complex
terrain sculpted by unfamiliar processes, amateurs examining
photographs at the very limit of resolution may be in trouble.
Their hopes and fears, the excitement of possible discoveries of
great import, may overwhelm the usual skeptical and cautious
approach of science.
Venus is a world with a stifling, scorching, poisonous
atmosphere entirely obscured by clouds. If we examine the
available surface images, an occasional peculiar landform will
swim into view — as, for example, a portrait of Joseph Stalin
discovered by American geologists analysing Soviet orbital radar
imagery (see illustration). No one maintains, I gather, that
unreconstructed Stalinists had doctored the magnetic tapes or
that the former Soviets were engaged in engineering activities of
unprecedented and hitherto unrevealed scale on the surface of
Venus — where every spacecraft to land has been fried in an
hour. The chances are overwhelming that this feature, whatever
it is, is due to geology and not to biology or engineering.
Mars is a magnificent world, exhibiting vast volcanic
mountains, ancient river valleys, and stacked plates in the polar
regions resembling a pile of discarded poker chips. It is much
more clement than Venus, although the Viking landers provided no
compelling evidence for life on Mars. With 100,000 available
["The Man in the Noon" (2A, 2/20/93)}
photographs, it is not surprising that claims have been made over

the years about something unusual on Mars. There is, for
example, a cheerful "happy face" sitting inside a Martian impact
crater 8 kilometers (5 miles) across, with a set of radial splash
marks outside, making it look like the conventional
representation of a smiling Sun (see illustration). But no one
claims that this has been engineered by an advanced Martian
civilization, perhaps to attract our attention, we recognize
that, with big and little objects falling from the sky and with
the surface rebounding and reconfiguring itself after each
impact, many different patterns will be formed all over the
planet. It is not surprising that occasionally we come upon
something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from
infancy, the face leaps out at us.
There are a number of small mountains on Mars that resemble
pyramids. There is even a cluster of them — the biggest a few
kilometers across at the base — all oriented in the same
direction. Is i% fair to deduce Martian pharaohs? Not really.
On a small scale, similar features are known on the Earth,
especially in Antarctica. Some of them would come up to your
knees. They are called dreikanters. from a German word meaning
three sides. It is improbable that they are manufactured by an
otherwise undetected race of miniature Egyptians living in the
Antarctic wasteland. They are, in fact, produced by wind erosion
— the action of fine particles picked up by strong winds blowing
["The Man ill the Moon" (2A, 2/20/93)]
mainly in the same direction and, over the years, sculpting what
once were irregular hummocks into nicely symmetrical pyramids.
On Mars, there is evidence of winds much fiercer than any
ever experienced on Earth, ranging up to half the speed of sound.
Vast sandstorms are commonplace. Over millions of years of
evolution of the Martian landscape, it would not be too
surprising if a few features -- even very large ones — were
sculpted by aeolian processes into the forms we see.
There is a place on Mars called Cydonia, where a great stone
face a kilometer in size stares unblinkingly up at the sky (see
illustration). It is an unfriendly face but recognizably human.
In some representations, it could have been sculpted by
Praxiteles. It lies in a landscape where many low hills have
been molded into odd forms, perhaps by some mixture of ancient
mudflows and subsequent wind erosion. From the number of impact
craters nearby, the face looks to be at least tens of millions
and perhaps billions of years old.
It has intermittently over the past decade attracted some
attention both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. The
headline that appeared in Weekly World News for November 20,
1984, was "Soviet Scientist's Amazing Claim: Ruined Temples
Found on Mars. Space Probe Discovers Remains of 50,000-Year-Old
Civilization." The revelations are attributed to an anonymous
source and allude to discoveries made by a nonexistent Soviet
space vehicle.
["The Man in the Moon" (2A, 2/20/93)] 8
But the story of the "face on Mars" is almost entirely an

American one. It was found by one of the yiking orbiters in 1976
[1977?]. There was an unfortunate dismissal of the feature as a
trick of the lighting by a project official, which led later to
the accusation that NASA was covering up the discovery of the
millennium. Some engineers and computer specialists, some of
them employed by NASA, on their own time worked to enhance the
image to better understand what it might be. They suspected it
might prove to be something spectacular. But that's permissible
in science, even encouraged — as long as your standards of
evidence are high. Many of them were fairly cautious and should
be commended for advancing the subject. Others were less
restrained, deducing not only that the face was a genuine,
monumental sculpture of a human being, but identifying a nearby
city with temples and fortifications. From quite spurious
arguments, one of them believed he had shown that the monuments
had a particular astronomical orientation — not now, though, but
millions of years ago, from which it followed that only in that
remote epoch were all these wonders constructed. But many
millions of years ago there were no human beings on Earth.
An American TsciTLra writer compares the Martian face to
"similar faces. . . constructed in civilizations on Earth. The
faces are looking up at the sky because they're looking up to
God." Is it a remnant of an ancient, long-extinct human
civilization on Mars? Might they have come to Earth and
["The Man in the Noon" (2A, 2/20/93)]
initiated life here? Or at least human life? Could it have been

constructed by alien visitors stopping on Mars for a brief
interlude? Was it left for us to discover? What does it imply
about human evolution? Many deep questions are elicited.
When we know only a little about this face, it is hard to
stare at it for very long without being roused to tremulous
speculation. When we know a little more, it grows less
enigmatic.
The surface area of Mars is almost 150 million square
kilometers. The area covered by the Martian "sphinx" is about
one square kilometer. Is it so astonishing that one postage-
stamp-sized patch in 150 million should look a little funny —
especially given our penchant, since infancy, for finding faces?
When we examine the neighboring jumble of hillocks, mesas, and
other complex surface forms, we recognize that the face is akin
to many other features on Mars that do not at all resemble a
human face. Why this resemblance? Would some ancient Martians
rework only this mesa (well, maybe a few others) and leave all
the others unimproved by monumental sculpture? Shall we conclude
that other blocky mesas are also sculpted into the form of faces,
but not faces known on Earth? Surely the burden of proof is on
the shoulders of those who believe the "face" is artificial.
If we>look)mpre carefully at the image, we see that a
fremmt
strategically placed "nost il" iis in fact*a bit of lost data in
the radio transmission from Mars to Earth.) When we examine other
pictures under different lighting conditions, we find that the

face is not nearly so symmetrical as it seems at first glance.
Despite our shortness of breath and the beating of our hearts,
this Martian sphinx looks natural ~ not artificial, not a dead
ringer for a human face ~ and probably was sculpted by slow
geological process over millions of years.
But my assessment might be wrong. It's hard to be sure
about a world that we've seen so little of. Maybe aeolian
erosion cannot produce pyramidal forms of such colossal
dimensions on Mars, for example. All of these features deserve
closer attention with higher resolution. Much more detailed
photos of the "face" would surely settle issues of symmetry and
settle the debate between geology and sculpture. Small impact
craters found on or near the face can settle fairly definitively
the issue of its age. In the unlikely case that the nearby
features were really once a city, that fact should be obvious on
closer examination. Even if these claims are highly improbable
— as I think they are — they are worth a look. Unlike the UFO
situation, we have here the opportunity for a definitive
experiment. The hypothesis is very much falsifiable. (And if
it's not, after much more careful scrutiny, falsified, the
significance of course could be very great.) I hope that
forthcoming American and Russian missions to Mars, which include
orbiters with high-resolution television cameras, will make a
special effort — among the hundreds of other scientific
questions to answer about Mar» ~ to look much more closely at

what some people call the pyramids, the face, and the city.
I think it is fair to say that scientists' minds are open
when exploring new worlds. If we knew what we would find there,
it would be unnecessary to go. There is no telling what will *e~
found in future missions to Mars or^the other fascinating worlds
in our neck of the cosmic woods. But skepticism must be a part
of exploration. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence.
•
[2, 2/20/93]
The Gift of Apollo
For the first time in my life, I saw the horizon as a curved

line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light —
our atmosphere. Obviously, this was not the "ocean" of air I had
been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by
its fragile appearance.
— Ulf Merbold, West German space shuttle astronaut
It's a sultry night in July. You've fallen asleep in the

armchair. Abruptly, you startle awake, disoriented. The
television set is on, but not the sound. You strain to
understand what you're seeing. Two ghostly white figures in
coveralls and helmets are softly dancing under a pitch-black sky.
They make strange little skipping motions, which propel them
upward amid barely perceptible clouds of dust. But something is
wrong. They take too long to come down. Encumbered as they are,
they seem to be flying — a little. You rub your eyes, but the
strange tableau persists.
Of all the events surrounding Apollo 11's landing on the
Moon on July 20, 1969, my most vivid recollection is its
dreamlike quality. Yes, it was an astonishing technological
achievement and a triumph for the United States. Yes, the
astronauts — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins, the
last keeping solitary vigil in lunar orbit — displayed death-
defying courage. Yes, as Armstrong said as he first alighted,
this was an historic step for the human species. But if you
turned off the sound, with its deliberately mundane and routine
[«The Gift of Apollo" (2, 2/20/93)] 2
chatter, and stared into that black-and-white television monitor,

you could glimpse that we humans had onoo again entered the realm
of myth and legend.
We knew the Moon from our earliest days. It was there when
our ancestors descended from the trees into the savannahs, when
we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone tools,
when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built
cities and set out to subdue the Earth. Folklore and popular
songs still celebrate a connection between the Noon and love.
The word "month" and the second day of the week are both named
after the Moon. Especially when we lived out-of-doors, it was a
major — if oddly intangible — presence in our lives.
The Moon was a metaphor for the unattainable: "You might as
well ask for the Moon," they used to say. For most of our
history, we had no idea what it was. A spirit? A god? A thing?
It didn't look like something big far away, but more like
something small nearby ~ something the size of a plate, maybe,
hanging in the sky a mile above our heads. Ancient Greek
philosophers debated the proposition "that the Moon is exactly as
large as it looks" (betraying a terrible confusion between linear
and angular size). Walking on the Moon would then have seemed a
screwball idea; it made more sense to imagine somehow climbing up
into the sky on a ladder or on the back of a giant bird, grabbing
the Moon, and bringing it down to Earth. But nobody ever did.
["The Gift Of Apollo" (2, 2/20/93)]
It was not until a few centuries ago that the idea of the
Moon as a place, a quarter of a million miles away, gained wide
currency; we're new at figuring out what worlds are and how they
work. And in that brief flicker of time, we've gone from the
earliest steps in understanding the Noon's nature to actually
walking on its surface. We calculated how objects move in space;
liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big rockets, telemetry,
reliable electronics, inertial guidance, and much else. Then we
sailed out into the sky.
The Moon is no longer unattainable. A dozen humans, all
Americans, made those odd skipping motions they called
"moonwalks" on the crunchy, cratered, ancient gray lava —
beginning on that July day in 1969. But since 1972, no one from
any nation has ventured there. Indeed, none of us has gone
anywhere since the glory days of Apollo except into low Earth
orbit — like a toddler who takes a few tentative steps outward
and then, breathless, retreats to the safety of his mother's
skirts.
Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a
few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was
Apollo really about?
The scope and audacity of John Kennedy's May 25, 1961
message to a joint session of Congress on "urgent National Needs"
— the speech that launched the Apollo program — dazzled me. We
would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived,
[«The Gift Of Apollo" (2, 2/20/93)]
navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order to send

a man to a world not yet explored — not even in a preliminary
way, with robots — and we would bring him safely back, and we
would do it before the decade was over. This confident
pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved
Earth orbit.
As a newly minted Ph.D., I actually thought all this had
something centrally to do with science. But President Kennedy
did not talk about discovering the origin of the Moon, for
example, or even about bringing samples of it back for study.
All he seemed to be interested in was sending someone there and
bringing him home. Kennedy's science advisor, Jerome Wiesner,
later told me he had a deal with the President: If the President
did not claim that Apollo was about science, then he, wiesner,
would support it. So if not science, what?
There were arguments about "spinoffs," contentions that
Apollo was a way to pump American technology. They boiled down
to something like this: "Give us $25 billion to put people on
the Moon, and we'll throw in Tang, a free cardiac pacemaker, and
a stickless frying pan." But anybody could see that if we were
after orange-juice substitutes or pacemakers or frying pans — or
even mainframe computers — we could invent them directly; we
didn't have to spend $25 billion and send people to the Moon in
the process.
I kept asking. The Apollo program is really about politics,

I was told. This sounded more promising. Nonaligned nations
would be tempted to drift toward the Soviet Union if it was ahead
in space exploration, if the U.S. showed insufficient "national
vigor." I didn't follow. Here was the United States, ahead of
the Soviet Union in virtually every area of technology — the
world's economic, military, and, on occasion, even moral leader
— and Indonesia would go Communist because Yuri Gagarin beat
John Glenn to Earth orbit? What's so special about space
technology? Suddenly I understood.
Sending people to orbit the Earth or robots to orbit the Sun
requires rockets — big, reliable, powerful rockets. Those same
rockets can be used for nuclear war. The same technology that
transports a man to the Moon can carry a nuclear warhead halfway
around the Earth. The same technology that puts an astronomer
and a telescope in Earth orbit can also put up a laser "battle
station." Even back then, there was talk in military circles,
East and West, about space as the new "high ground," about the
nation that "controlled" space "controlling" the Earth. Of
course strategic rockets were being tested on Earth. But heaving
a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead to a target zone in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn't buy much glory. Sending
people into space, though, captures the imagination of the world.
You wouldn't spend the money to launch astronauts for this reason
alone, but of all the ways of demonstrating rocket potency, this
one works best.

There were six more missions after Apollo 11. all but one of
which successfully landed on the lunar surface. Apollo 17 was
the first to carry a scientist. As soon as he got there, the
program was canceled. The first scientist and the last human to
land on the Moon were the same person. The program had already
served its purpose that July night in 1969. The half-dozen
subsequent missions were just momentum.
Apollo was not mainly about science. It was not even mainly
about space. Apollo was mainly about ideological confrontation
and nuclear war — often described by such euphemisms as world
"leadership" and national "prestige." Nevertheless, good space
science was done. We now know much more about the composition,
age, and history of the Moon and the origin of the lunar
landforms. We have made progress in understanding where the Moon
came from. (The best current idea is that it was generated from
the debris in the collision of a small planet on an errant orbit
with the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.) More important,
Apollo provided an aegis, an umbrella under which brilliantly
engineered robot spacecraft were dispatched throughout the Solar
System, making that preliminary reconnaissance of dozens of
worlds. The offspring of Apollo have now reached the planetary
frontiers.
If not for Apollo — and, therefore, if not for the
political purpose it served — I doubt whether the historic
American expeditions of exploration and discovery throughout the

Solar System would have occurred. Something similar is true for
the pioneering Soviet efforts in solar system exploration,
including the first landings of robot spacecraft on another
planet.
Apollo conveyed a confidence, energy, and breadth of vision
that did capture the imagination of the world. That too vas
part of its purpose. It inspired an optimism about technology,
an enthusiasm for the future. If we could go to the Moon, what
else was now possible? Even those who were not admirers of the
United States readily acknowledged that — whatever the
underlying reason for the program — the nation had, with Apollo,
achieved greatness.
When you pack your bags for a big trip, you never know
what's in store for you. The Apollo astronauts on their way to
and from the Moon photographed their home planet. It was a
natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few foresaw.
For the first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see our world
from above — the whole Earth, the Earth in color, the Earth as
an exquisite white and blue world set against the vast darkness
of space. Those images have awakened our slumbering planetary
consciousness; they provide incontestable evidence that we all
share the same vulnerable planet — our only home in the entire
Solar System. They remind us of what is important and what is
not. The Saudi Arabian astronaut Prince Sultan Salman al-Saud,
["The Gift of Apollo" (2, 2/20/93)] 8
after his observations of the Earth from the Discovery shuttle in

1985, recalled: "The first day or so, we all pointed to our
countries. The third or fourth day, we were pointing to our
continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth."
We may have found that perspective just in time, just as our
technology threatens the habitability of our world. Whatever the
reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired in
Cold War nationalism it was, the inescapable recognition of the
unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous
dividend, the unexpected gift of Apollo. What began in deadly
competition has led us to see that global cooperation is the
essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.
fBroca II, draft 1, 8/12/92]
*-20li'f, #Br "Explorers," ga-gaQe. Nuvembm 22,

4-6. Excerpted, November 20, 1987, by Ass75c^rated__||ress
in Chicago Sun-Times. Baltimore Sun, Arkansas Gazetted Staten
Island Advance. Fort Worth Star-Telearamf Chidaao Tribune. Las
Vegas Review-Journal. Syracuse Post-Stamiard. Modesto Bee,
Winston-Salem Journal. Miami NewsC and many other newspapers.
Excerpted in "Launch Heaj?dAround the Country," by Aaron Epstein,
Ft. Wayne (IN) News^Sehtinelf January 30, 1988; Detroit Free
Press. JanuarY31, 1988, ÏB- 7B. Reprinted in The 1989
Informateion Please Almanac (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989),
350^351. Reprinted in Muy Interesante (Mexico City) as
"Seguiremos Siendo Exploradores," Ocrober 1988, 12-16.
•frEex-L (quuLdLlün Illdilii UluihtoO^]

I know where I was when the space age began. In early
October 1957, I was a graduate student at the University of
Chicago, working toward a doctorate in planetary astronomy. The
previous year, when Mars was the closest it ever gets to Earth, I
had been at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, peering through
the telescope and trying to understand something <e£ what our
neighboring world is like. But there had been dust storms on
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert Q into "Explorers," p. 2:

I'd even bet some physics friends at the University of Chicago
around 1955 that we would be walking on the Moon by 1980.
[Audiotape: "asterisk" (i.e., footnote):] I also bet that we
would be on Mars by 1990. Not even close.
[1987, #6: "Explorers"]
both planets, and Mars was 40 million miles away. When you're
stuck on the surface of the Earth, those other worlds are
tantalizing but inaccessible.
I was sure that someday spaceflight would be possible. I
knew something about Robert Goddard and V-2 rockets and Project
Vanguard and even Soviet pronouncements earlier ^n the 1950s
about their ultimate intentions to explore the planets. •'But
despite all that, Sputnik 1 caught me by surprise. I hadn't
imagined that the Soviets would beat the United States to Earth
orbit, and I was startled by the large payload (which, American
commentators claimed, must have been reported with a misplaced
decimal point). Here the satellite was, beeping away,
effortlessly circling the Earth every 90 minutes, and my heart
soared — because it meant that we would be going to the planets
in my lifetime. The dreams of visionary engineers and writers —
Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, von Braun, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice
Burroughs — were about to be fulfilled.
Thie year is the 30th anni-veuui/y of Sputnik 1 « the first
artifact of the human species to orbit the Earth. It ic also the
¿¿«/•¿•I ■5'^»y*» f**»ri*/
.?5fh annivoroairy ef Mariner 2, the first spacecraft to explore
another planet. These two achievements ~ one Soviet, the other
American — mark a new age of exploration, a new direction for
our species: the extension of the human presence to other
worlds.
[1987, #6: "Explorers"]
We have always been explorers. It Is part of our nature.

Since we first evolved a million years jor so/ago) in Africa, we
have wandered and explored our way across the planet. There are
now humans on every continent ~ from pole to pole, from Mount
Everest to the Dead Sea — on the ocean bottoms and in residence
200 miles up in the sky. K L Sm*** #•¥ 4-ki» 4+ f«^-r*¿*c.4*<»M ?^J
The first large-scale migration from the Old World to the
New happened during the last ice age, around 11,500 years ago,
when the growing polar ice caps shallowed the oceans and made it
possible to walk on dry land from Siberia to Alaska. A thousand
years later, we were in Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of
South America. Long before Columbus, people from Borneo settled
Madagascar, off the African coast; Indonesians in outrigger
canoes explored the Western Pacific; and a great fleet of ocean-
going junks from Ming Dynasty China crisscrossed the Indian
Ocean, established a base in Zanzibar, rounded the southern tip
of Africa, and entered the Atlantic Ocean. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, American and Russian explorers, traders,
and settlers were racing -fjñ woot and east across two vast
continents to the Pacific. This exploratory urge has clear
survival value. It is not restricted to any one nation or ethnic
group. It is an endowment that the human species holds in
common.
At just the time when the Earth has become almost entirely
explored, other worlds beckon. The nations that have pioneered
[1987, #6: "Explorers"]
this new age of exploration are the Spviet Union and the United
States — motivated nationalistically, of course, but serving as
well as the vanguard of our species in space. Their combined ii3*f>'- Pit.
r»r*»Ait,
achievements (*»»<► XJQY, m-m' ttH<J*S are the stuff of legend. We
humans have sent robots, then animals, and then ourselves above
the blue skies of Earth into the black interplanetary void. The
footprints of 12 of us are scattered across the lunar surface,
where they will last another million years. We have flown by
some 40 new worlds, many of them discovered in the process. Our
ships have set gently down on scorching Venus and chilly Mars —
returning images of their surfaces and searching for life. Once
above our blanket of air, we have turned our telescopes into the
depths of space and back on our small planet to see it as one
interconnected and interdependent whole. We have launched
artificial moons and artificial planets, and have sent four
spacecraft on their way to the stars.
From the standpoint of a century ago, these accomplishments
are breathtaking. From a longer perspective, they are mythic.
If we manage to avoid self-destruction, so that there are future
historians, our time will be remembered in part because this was
when we first set sail for other worlds. In the long run, as we
straighten things out here, there will be more of us up there.
There will be robot emissaries and human outposts throughout the
Solar System. We will become a multiplanet species.
[1987, #6: "Explorers"]
We are not motivated by gold or spices or slaves or a

passion to convert the heathen to the One True Faith, as were the
European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Our
goals include exploration, science and technology, national
prestige, and a recognition that the future is calling. There is
a very practical reason as well: We can take better care of the
Earth (and its inhabitants) by studying it from space and by
comparing it with other worlds.
But whatever our reasons, we are on our way. We advance by
fits and starts; there are detours and failures of nerve. The
long-term trend, though, is clear: It is getting cheaper and
easier to go into space,—and thoro ic progressively more for us
to do there.
a. >S4g\*r»tA* t '»*\t-êm
Only a handful of nations have access to space at the
moment, but their number is increasing.4 France and China are now
lifting commercial payloads for a profit. Japan and the European
Space Agency, in 1986, mustered their first, extremely successful
missions into interplanetary space. There will be other
spacefaring nations in the next few decades. Others may lose
their determination and their vision, as did Portugal, which
trailblazed the great sailing-ship voyages of discovery and then
gradually sank into obscurity. «Wnhappily ■— astonishingly ■■ the.
Uni-tod etatoc may beoume the first nation to back ol
exploration of epaoe.
Cn¿€> #*«VM (. **+9
-O
f Broca II, draft 1, 8/12/92]
1P86, #87: "On the Prohiotory of tho Planutary Oociefcyj"

>Tha Planetary Reporte 0 (2) (January/February) i 4«6.
TU
• «í«* *«*>
yj
On November 13, 1971, the American spacecraft Mariner 9_ was
successfully injected into orbit around Mars — the first
spacecraft in human history to orbit another planet. But Mars
was enveloped in a global dust storm, as the American and foreign
news media dutifully reported before leaving the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory for more urgent business.
By January, the dust storm began to clear and extraordinary
vistas of Mars were transmitted, including the largest volcanic
mountains known in the Solar System, ancient river valleys on a
planet now bone dry, a profusion of strange albedo markings on
the surface, and clear evidence of geological stratification, at
least in the polar terrain.
Eventually 7,329 pictures were acquired. Those of us
privileged to participate in this extraordinary mission felt that
the human species was exploring a wondrous new world; we were
confident that many others would share our excitement. We were
also aware that since such projects are supported by the American
people, it is only proper that the public see what they are
paying for.
So the Offices of Public Information at JPL and at NASA
Headquarters called the media back. Individual scientists did so
as well. I called — or tried to call — every television and
[1986f-fVH aon the Prehistory ot The Planetary societyj
print reporter I could think of. But with only a few exceptions,
the answer was the same: Mariner 9 had achieved orbit in
November 1971; this was now January of the following year. These
findings weren't "news." We should have arranged for the
pictures to be available when the reporters were at JPL months
before. And anyway, the public — »ew^saturated with Apollo
footage — just wasn't interested in exploring other worlds.
Although things were a little better in 1976 with the two
Viking landings on Mars, many of us felt that the reportage was
again grossly inadequate for the drama of the first successful
landings on Mars, the first search for life on another planet,
and especially for the stream of exquisite pictures — ideal for
the visual medium of television. There was a widespread
underestimate, it seemed to me, of the intelligence and spirit -e#-^
a<**enTuTe of the American public. CT*»** «*p«¿«"~ *-» •- f'.'tofj
*»
Tfeis was often gefrl ecte««when planetary scientists would
talk to members of Congress or the Executive Branch. 1 can
remember, in the early and very shaky days of the Galileo
project, entering the
tJ office of a key committee member of
Congress and finding a picture of Jupiter on the wall. Well, at
least this one ought to be easy, 1 thought. But 1 was mistaken.
Yes, members of Congress or their aides might be interested in
planetary exploration; they might understand its symbolic,
historical, scientific, and practical values. But unfortunately
the American public wasn't the least interested in planetary
ftf \*T Ai*»*** S AÍ#«T w>n¿«i'c ffptri-

[1986, #l>î^*Un tnê Prehistory of The-
exploration, I was told. In the Congressman's entire district

there were only three people who had chosen to write on Galileo,
and two of them were below voting age. There was no industry in
the district that would produce components for Galileo. The
Congressman felt he could vote against the wishes of the
leadership of his party only on a few, carefully selected
occasions. This was not one of them.
But this issue really crystallized for me in December 1977
when I was asked to discuss the space program — and astromony
more generally — with then President Jimmy Carter and Vice
President Walter Móndale and their families, one evening at the
Vice President's residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval
Observatory.
Since such Presidential briefings must be rare, I felt it
was my responsibility to treat the subject of astronomy and space
sciences as evenhandedly as I could, and resist the temptation to
lay stress on my own particular interests. But the Viking
mission was still ongoing, the pictures spectacular, and I was
repeatedly detained on my way to the Crab Nebula and beyond by
Presidential interest in Mars. How definitive were the
apparently negative results on life? Why had we landed in such
dull places when there were such exciting places all over the
planet? Hadn't we heard of "nothing ventured, nothing gained^' {
I found myself in the unlikely posture of pleading caution and
fiscal responsibility to a President caught up in an exploratory
11 \,ii
\i
[4^3-93.atp]
[For a combined chapter which begins with "Explorers," has

some on the prehistory of the Planetary Society, and will end
with a piece from the Goldin/Sagan dialogue; this will be insert
A (we tried a previous one which I didn't like; I'm going to do
it again) on p. 4 of what used to be "On the Prehistory of the
Planetary Society":]
[(Later on audiotape:) You will see on the page in which
this insert A is going ("On the Prehistory of the Planetary
Society," p. 4) there are a circled few sentences. That should
be inserted in insert A, right after the place where I talk about
"... means there must be many millions of others who share
their concerns."]
[Insert A:]
This organization, based in Pasadena, California, is a public
membership organization which is the largest space-interest group
in the world, with members mainly in the united States but also
on seven continents, including Antarctica, and in over 100
countries. In its early days it was one of the fastest-growing
major organizations in America. It is devoted to planetary
exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life. It has
trained Latin American teachers in planetary science; sponsored
worldwide student contests; given maps of Mars to American high
schools; supported trailblazing research in the radio search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, in the detection of near-Earth
[4-3-93.atp]
asteroids, and in the design and testing of balloon and rover

exploratory vehicles for Mars. It has been a voice for
international cooperation in space. And it has had some notable
successes (as well as some failures) in supporting key NASA
programs in spacecraft exploration of the Solar System and the
radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The mere fact
that so many people are so passionately involved with the subject
itself has political influence. It tends to counteract some of
the concerns so often encountered in Washington — "I of course
understand the importance of these things, but unfortunately the
public doesn't." Well, it turns out that a significant fraction
of the public does. The Society has far outpaced the most
optimistic expectations that Bruce Murray — then director of the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory — and I had in mind when, in 1977, we
discussed — at first very casually -- organizing such a society.
If there are 100,000 people who pay dues and keep up their
memberships, then there must be many millions of others who share
their concerns.
But not everyone does. Some people see the space program as
a succession of catastrophes — seven brave Americans killed on a
mission whose main function was to launch a communications
satellite that could have been launched without risking any
people at all; a billion-dollar telescope launched with a
nearsighted lens; a spacecraft to Jupiter whose main antenna —
essential for returning data to Earth -- would not unfurl. Some
[4-3-93.atp]
people cringe every time NASA talks about space exploration, when
it describes sending astronauts 200 miles up in a tin can that
goes nowhere. Some people look at the space program as a
stalking horse for the military and grandiose plans to put
weapons into space despite the fact that an orbiting weapon is a
sitting duck. And NASA, at least until recently, has shown all
the symptoms of an aging, arteriosclerotic bureaucracy. There is
considerable merit in many of these criticisms. But they should
not obscure the enormous practical and historical significance of
the space program.
The justification for sending humans on expensive and
dangerous missions that could be done just as well by robots is,
at the very least, a dubious proposition. It is often justified
on the grounds that only "manned" missions (and, the counterpoint
thought is almost never mentioned explicitly, the risks involved)
can maintain public interest. I believe this opinion, widespread
in some quarters, shows real contempt for the citizens on whose
behalf the program is presumably being carried out. Manned
spaceflight aside, there is a surprisingly wide range of
justifications for the space program. Some people resonate more
with some parts of the program than with others: [And then we
pick up on the Goldin/Sagan dialogue.]
[1986, #87: "On the Prehistory of The_Bla«eLaiy Society"]
passion — easy to come by when discussing Mars.

My hosts were knowledgeable and hospitable. After I
finished — satisfactorily in the realm of galaxies — the
President took me aside.
"You know, you ought to write a few more books to really get
people interested in planetary exploration. Then we could do
some really exciting missions."
"But Mr. President," I protested, "you only need write your
name at the bottom of a single piece of paper and we could have a
rover mission to Mars."
Mr. Carter only smiled.
The clear lesson from such experiences was that the future
of planetary exploration, at least in the United States, might
very well depend on the perception by politicians and the media
of public interest in the subjectf and this is the path that for
me led to The Planetary Society.4SThe Society's extraordinary
/success — as well as many other lines of evidence, including the
appearance of Saturn on the covers of Time and Newsweek. the
success of Cosmosf ABC's Nightline devoting whole programs to
live coverage of the Voyager encounters, and much else —
demonstrates very clearly, I think, enormous public interest in,
and support for, the exploration of the planets. This is even
more true of the search for extraterrofrtiri^1 'n1"fl1
p
"t'hfcfuë coiicéfns Wëië^yëiy much on my mind when in 197° mizg_
ay and I discussed ■■ at fiisL vm?y oaGuaílv "■■ a now
Murray _
JjSroca II, draft if 8/12/92]
[1/1/93 Vita : ] 1992, #36: Dan Goldin/ánd Carl Sagan: A

Dialogue on the Future of Planetary Exploration, Beckmann
Auditorium, California Institute of/Technology, Pasadena, CA,
December 4, 1992. Reported in "Speaking Up: Noteworthy
Addresses in the Southland, nA¿gs Angeles Timesf December 11,
1992; "Goldin Criticizes Space Bureaucracy at Town Meeting,"
Space News. December 14/20, 1992, 22.
[2/20/93 audiotape: also, Engineering and Science

(California Institute of Technology), Winter 1993, in press.|
[Fron/preliminary copy, Engineering and Science, pp. 30, 31;

quotation marks omitted:]
>S:]
■Phege's a lange of" justifications. People resonate
differently.—Let am talk a llLLle about apace in general, not
just NASA programs.» Communications satellites link up the
planet. Meteorological satellites predict the weather, saving
many billions of dollars worth of crops every year. Military-
reconnaissance and treaty-verification satellites make the planet
more secure. Satellites, especially thooe that are coming along,
monitor the health of the global environment and check out the
greenhouse effect, the depletion of the ozone layer, and new
dangers we haven't even thought about yet. All of those are
immensely practical and cost-effective.
[ (l/l/S^-îtar)—1992, #30;—HD5H"~Góldin and Carl Sagan*
Then there's the issue- of exploration. Humans for 99

percent of our history were hunter-gatherers. We wandered. We
followed the game. Exploration is built into us. And just at
the moment when the planet is all explored, save perhaps for
under the ocean, the planets open up as a goal for exploration.
Many people feel this in a strong, emotional way -- one could
even call it religious, in the sense that they have difficulty
justifying it rationally.
And there are the deep questions that each society, one way
or another, asks — the origin of life; the origin of our planet;
the origin, nature, and fate of the Universe. I think you'd have
to be made out of wood not to wonder, at least a little, about
those questions. Through folklore, religion, superstition, or
science, every human culture has invested some of its resources
in answering those questions. So it is reasonable for us who
can, for the first time, actually find out some of the answers to
¿•Ht*» AY\
make this investment as well.
If you mix those three together — the directly practical,
the zest for exploration, and the answering of questions of
origins — I think you'll catch a sense of what motivates a ldt
of people about space. And one last thing,'— the vision of the—
futuro LhaL'L» oír erect up to young people in um sucieLy is almoct
universally dismal — something like guys with automatic weapons"
on bmnheri-out post-nucloar-war highways. wrinE- .riju-rl- of onr
sociwLyi iu Lhü natural course of doing büginebb, offers—a_
[(1/1/93 1992, #36: "Dan Goldin
hopeful vision of the future? It's the space program, -it's new
worlds, new exploration. It's something that young people can be
motivated by, that can help guide their lives, make them work
hard and study science. That's worth a whole lot. I think NASA,
despite all -ei its problems and its ossified bureaucracy, is a
fantactic bargain. And I'd like to wrap up this_ej
N^rtr-Mireej^n fry r^y^y^ thftt, rl ft V fT I M I HI I j I |1J ITIVl-fUlly tO Hiin^JT.
*±s"wide variety of questions, I think that NASA

finally has got a breath of fresh air.
[1987, #6: "Explorers"]
fcher missions continuing the mythic tradition need to be

approveu: a spacecraft that will keep pace with a comet in its
orbit around the Sun; an advanced X-ray observatory; the Cassini
mission to\ Titan, a world whose air is filled with organic
; the sort that, 4 billion years ago, led to the
origin of life on Earth; a radio telescope that can look back in
time to glimpse the Universe shortly after it began; and,
especially, a set of robot explorers of Mars, culminating in the
first human footfall on another planet (see "Let's Go to Mars
Together," ParadeV February 2, 1986). These missions should be
international — accepting proffered Soviet cooperation,
broadening the scientific and engineering talent involved,
reducing the costs to\ any one nation, and helping to bring our
world together while exploring others. Such an objective has
been endorsed by every U.S. President but one since the dawn of
planetary exploration (see box, preceding page). And all this
would cost a small fraction of the multitrillion-dollar bill for
the technically dubious Sta\r Wars program ("The Leaky Shield,"
Parade. December 8, 1985).
It has been my good fortune to have participated, from the
beginning, in this new age of exploration; to have worked with
those glistening Mariners, Apollos, Pioneers, Vikings, and
Voyagers in their journeys between the worlds, a technology that
harmed no one, that even America's adversaries admired and
respected; to have played some part in the preliminary
[1987, #6: "Explorers"] 8
reconnaissance of the Solar System in which we live. I feel the

same joy today in these exploratory triumphs that I did -30 ypars_
açe when Sputnik 1 first circumnavigated the Earth, when our
expectations of what technology could do for us were nearly
boundless.
But since that time, something has soured. The anticipation
of progress has been supplanted by a foreboding of technological
ruin. I look into my daughter'.s eyes and ask myself what kind of
future we are preparing for our children. We have offered them
visions of a future in which — unable to read, to think, to
invent, to compete, to make things work, to anticipate events —
our nation sinks into lethargy and economic decay; in which
ignorance and greed conspire to destroy the air, the water, the
soil, and the climate; in which we permit a nuclear holocaust.
The visions we present to our children shape the future. It
matters what those visions are. Often they become self-
fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst
futures; if we are to avoid them, we must understand that they
are possible. But where are the alternatives? Where are the
dreams that motivate and inspire? Where are the visions of
hopeful futures, of times when technology is a tool for human
well-being and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads?
Our children long for realistic maps of a future they (and we)
can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose?
[1987, #6: "Explorers"] 9
Continuing, cooperative planetary exploration cannot solve

all our problems. It is merely one component of a solution. But
it is practical, readily understood, cost-effective, peaceful,
and stirring. It is our responsibility, I believe, to create a
future worthy of our children, to fulfill the promise made
decades ago by Sputnik 1 and Mariner 2, to open up the Universe
to those intrepid explorers from planet Earth.
* * *
[8/29/92: Above, bottom of^page 3: "... Their combined

achievements (see box, next page) are the stuff of legend. . ."
Page 7, top: ". . . ySiich an objective has been endorsed by every
U.S. President but one since the dawn of planetary exploration
(see box, preceding page). . ." But no boxes appear in photocopy
supplied^ ]
* * *
[In bold print h biographical squib:]
FOR MORE INFORMATION
To leârn more about the exploration of the Solar System and

the search for extraterrestrial life, readers may wish to write
2_l
1990, #13: "Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting This One:

The Connection," The-glanefeacy RepeH^J (lj^ffftiTmaasyyii'rtii'iMMsy
^1990), 4-7 ■—Reprinted—in-^5eienee Fiction. Science Factr-and-You
«-{New-JCark-f—Amsco "SchôôlPubl icat ions ) /in" press. Ëxcërpted—tir
^99X^-lft#ormatiOïrTIease Almanac (Boston! Hbughton Mlfflln,-
19ftO)^_a26-327
rEpiaraah-^lLallulzml In Trm . •) —»
"For the first tine in my life, I saw the horizon as a
curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue
light — our atmosphere. Obviously, this was not the 'ocean* of
air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was
terrified by its fragile appearance." — Ulf Merbold, W*»fe German
space shuttle astronaut
[Figure captions:]
"Tropical storm Xina draws clouds into its vortex as it
builds strength north of the Hawaiian Islands. Such cyclonic
storms are common to planets with atmospheres."
"The ozone hole over Antarctica, caused by human-made
chemicals released, into the atmosphere, is only one of several
threats to Earth's environment discovered, in part, through
planetary studies. This image, made from data taken by the
Nimbus 2 satellite, showà. the extent of the hole (dark purple) on
October 5, 1989."
[1990, #13: "Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting. . . "]
"Venus' clouds enshroud a world of broiling surface

temperatures. The greenhouse effect on Venus helped alert us to
the dangers of the increasing greenhouse on Earth."
"Cyclonic storms form on/Mars as well as on Earth. By
studying weather patterns dh other planets, we gain insight into
similar processes on our/own planet."
"Scientists attempting to understand Mars' global dust
storms realized that a nuclear war might produce similar effects
on Earth, and so/nelped to develop the concept of 'nuclear
winter.'"
"In stable air over a calm ocean, cellular clouds such as
these groy through slow, convective motion. This image was taken
from the shuttle Discovery over Ascension Island in the Atlantic
The intricate, changing patterns of Earth's weather can
be/affected by human activities."
¿Text—fgtrotâtloTnftarks omitted) r]—'

The Apollo images of Earth from space revealed plainly the
fragility and vulnerability of our lovely little world, and
powerfully assisted the coming of age of a global ecological
consciousness. Such pictures by themselves may be worth the
whole cost of £he space program, because their meaning has
njány. But what is not so widely understood is how
much vitaX and urgent information we have gained about our own
world from robotic exploration of other worlds.
1,2-1
[4-6-93.at2]
Insert B into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

Protecting This One," p. 3:
An art fancier who knows only Egyptian tomb paintings, a courtier
who knows only blue jeans, a philosopher who knows only one
philosophy, a [and then we pick up "linguist. . ."].
I,¿I
[4-6-93.at2]
Insert C into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

What once seemed the only way the world could be, turns out to be
somewhere in the middle of a vast range of alternatives. When we
look at those other worlds, we can understand what the
consequences are of having too much of one thing or too little of
another.
2J
[4-6-93.at2]
Insert D into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

Suppose, for example, that ve have a three-dimensional general
circulation computer model of the Earth's climate that purports
to be able to predict what the Earth will be like if there's more
of one gas or less of another. The model does very well at
predicting the present climate, but is it reliable in rather
different climatic regimes? One way to test this program is to
apply it to the climates of other planets. Can it predict the
structure of the atmosphere on Mars and the climate there, the
weather? Or on Venus? If it were to fail in these test cases of
other planets, we would be right in mistrusting it when it makes
predictions for our own planet. In fact, climate models now in
use do very well in predicting from the principles of physics the
climates on Venus and Mars.
[4-6r93.at2]
Insert A into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

When we look down at Earth from orbital altitudes, we see a
lovely, fragile planet floating in the black vacuum. As you
journey further away, as the Apollo astronauts did, you see it
shrink in apparent size, so many of its features and aspects that
dominate our daily lives gradually becoming invisible. You're
struck by how self-contained this world is. An occasional
hydrogen atom leaves; a pitter-patter of cometary dust arrives.
And of course there's sunlight generated in the immense
thermonuclear engine deep in the Sun's interior and racing away
from the Sun in all directions. The Earth intercepts a little
bit of it, and that provides nearly all the light and heat on
Earth. But apart from that, this little world is on its own.
From the surface of the Noon you can see it, perhaps as a
crescent, even its continents now indistinct. And from the
vantage point of the outermost planet it is a mere point of
light.
Back in Earth orbit, you can see why there is no longer such
a thing as a local environmental problem. Even from this
perspective it's hard to make out national boundaries. But even
if we could, it's clear that molecules don't carry passports.
Industrial poisons, greenhouse gases, and substances that attack
the protective ozone layer do not — doubtless out of ignorance
[4-6-93.at2]
— respect national boundaries; they are oblivious of the notion

of national sovereignty. And so, because of the vast, almost
mythic powers of our technology (and the prevalence of short-term
thinking) on continental, even planetary scales — by industrial
and radioactive wastes [I'm talcing some of this from 1987:1, "The
Planetary Perspective," p. 1)1 acid rain; deforestation and
erosion; depletion of the ozone layer; and global warming — we
are beginning to pose a danger to ourselves. It is clear at a
glance that if many of these problems are to be solved, they will
have to be solved by many nations acting in concert for a long
time. It is a minor irony of our times that spaceflight —
conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds —
brings with it, in the natural process of doing business, a
stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time
contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply ingrained
nationalisms begin to fade. They seem the squabbles of microbes
on a marble [better metaphor?]. The Earth is one world.
[1990, #13;
i
"Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting. . ."]
If we are stuck on one world, we are limited to

case; we do not know what else is possible. Then like a llinguist
who knows only English, or a physicist who knows about gravity
only from falling bodies on Earth, our insights are narrow and
mspr-ihed_s^B
our predictive abilities severely circumscribed^^ But when we
explore other worlds, our perspective widens. ' We gain a new
understanding of worlds in general, infflnrling our own^ (
Robotic exploration of other worlds has already opened our
eyes in many fields of Earth science,
nee, inclue
includin study of
volcanoes, earthquakes, and weather* It may turn out to have
profound implications for biology, because all life on Earth is
built on a common biochemical master plan. The discovery of a
single extraterrestrial organism — even something as humble as a
bacterium — would revolutionize biology. But the connection
between exploring other worlds and protecting our own is most
evident in the study of Earth's climate and the burgeoning threat
to the climate that our technology now represents.*yother planets
T" i —
provide -important insights about what dumb things not to do to
Earth]
Three^nvironmenta^foatactrophas, or potential catastrophes,
have been uncovered accidentally, mainly in the last two decades:
ozonosphère depletion, greenhouse warming, and nuclear winter. —£
yaiiL Ur"iefiy to~skuLch ¡junto of the ways in which pli
pyplnnl lAh alilixl HI»! ~A****p£uaf>ri t-hese findings
[1990, #13: "Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting. . ."]
.JEhinninq Ozune Shield

It was disquieting to discover that an inert material with
all sorts of practical functions — it serves as the working
fluid in refrigerators and air conditioners, as propellant for
deodorants and other products in aerosol cans, and as lightweight
foamy packaging for fast foods, to name only a few — can pose a
danger to life on Earth. Who would have figured it?
The molecules in question are called chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs). They are extremely chemically inert, which means they
are invulnerable — until they find themselves up in the ozone
layer, where they are dissociated by sunlight. The chlorine
atoms thus liberated deplete the ozone and let more ultraviolet
light from the Sun reach the ground.
This increased ultraviolet intensity ushers in a ghastly
procession of potential consequences involving not just skin
cancer but weakening of the human immune system and, most
dangerous of all, the- destruction ef agriculture and of
«0
photosynthetic roiogoorganisms at the base of the food chainAon
which most life on Earth depends.
The principal manufacturer of this material, £he Dupont
company (which gave it the brand name Freon) jr* after years of
pooh-poohing the concern of environmentalists, after taking out
full-page ads in newspapers and scientific magazines claiming
that the uproar all came from^wild extrapolations from inadequate
data, that nobody hadâctually demonstrated any peril ~ that
í »,
[1990, #13: "Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting. . ."] ¡
company has now announced that it will rapidly phase—out all its
CFC production. The precipitating event seems to have beeja^the
discovery inxf986 by British scientists of a hole ijv€he
Antarctic ozone layer. There is^now good evidence of thinning of
the ozone layer at other latitudes as well.
Who discovered that CFCs posed a threat to the ozone layer?
Was it, Dupont exercising corporate responsibility? Nojpt. Was it
the Environmental Protection Agency protecting us? Nope. Was it
the Department of Defense defending us? Nofe. It was two ivory-
tower, white-coated university gtmluiitas working in 1974 on
something else — Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the
University of California, Irvine. ""
/V*Tr ev*n «v\ -L W-M I—
T^T" ¿'"//"""V "£"* ""'
•*•* » ^ y
Their work used reaction rate constants of chemical
reactions involving chlorine and other halogens, determined in
part with NASA support. Why NASA? Because Venus has chlorine
and fluorine molecules in its atmosphere — as discovered by U.S.
spacecraft and ground-based observations — and planetary
aeronomers faio in TPRi aotronomerq?> wanted to understand
what's happening there.
Thank Ymx, Vuimit ■

ô *«
Confirming theoretical work on ozone depletion was done with
a big computer model by a group led by Michael McElroy at
Harvard. How is it they had all these branching networks of
halogen chemical kinetics in their computer ready to go? Because
1/2-1 f
[4-6-93.at2]
Insert E into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

Bat simple organic molecules ought to be there, because of the
impact of organic-rich meteorites from the nearby asteroid belt.
I/Il
[4-6-93.at2]
Insert F into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

The Viking microbiology experiments found that organic matter
carried to Mars and sprinkled with Martian surface dust is
quickly oxidized and destroyed. The materials in the dust do the
destruction on molecules like hydrogen peroxide — which is used
as an antiseptic because it kills microbes in the same way.
theyAwere working on the halogen chemistry of the atmosphere of

Venus. Venus helped make^the discovery that the Earth's ozone
layer is in danger.
r. /i-+*
(Suoh oeimidlplty, by the way, is
many djsr^verirn i-^v-qrirnrf», )
'There is an absolutely unexpected connection between the
atmospheric photochemistries of two planets, and suddenly a very
practical result emerges from the most blue-sky, abstract kind of
work, understanding the upper atmosphere of Venus.
There is also a Mars connection to ozone depletion on Earth.
m Vikina found the surface of Mars to be lifeless and remarkably
deficient even in simple organic molecules. ' This deficiency is
widely understood as due to the lack of ozone in the Martian
® atmosphere. «Ultraviolet light from the Sun strikes the surface

of Mars unimpeded; if any organic matter were there, it would be
*W its, if ./,
quickly destroyed by solar ultraviolet light or the.oxidation
products of aolcfr ultraviolet light. Thus part of the reason
that the topmost layer;of Mars are antiseptic is that Mars has an
all by .'"¿«ei"*
ozone hole of planetary dimensions — a pooaibly useful
cautionary tale for us, who are busily making holes in our ozone
layer.
Now let'3 luuk" aL (global warmrng from the increasing

greenhouse effect, which datives largely from carbon dioxide
generated by the burning of fossil fuels — but also from the
f,2J
[4-6-93.at2]
Insert G into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

Hansen has developed one of the major computer climate
models and applied it to predict what will happen to our climate
as the greenhouse gases continue to build up. He has been in the
forefront of testing these models on ancient climates of the
Earth. (During the ice age, it is interesting to note, more
carbon dioxide is correlated with higher temperatures, and vice
versa.) He has collected a very wide range of data from the last
many decades to see what is actually happening to the global
temperature, and to compare it to the predictions of what should
have happened. He has courageously testified before Congress in
the face of a politically-generated order from the White House
Office of Management and Budget (this was in the Reagan years) to
exaggerate the uncertainties and to minimize the conclusions.
His calculation of by how much the explosion of the Philippine
volcano Mt. Pinatubo will temporarily reduce the Earth's
temperature (by about a half degree Centigrade) was right on the
money. He has been a force in convincing governments that global
warming is something to be taken seriously.
How did Hansen get interested in the greenhouse effect in
the first place? My doctoral thesis was mainly about explaining
the high radio brightness of Venus in terms of a very hot
surface, and showing that a very large amount of carbon dioxide
[4-6-93.at2]
with some water vapor might explain such high temperatures via
the greenhouse effect. There were a number of scientists who
were skeptical about this notion (and the surface temperature of
Venus is so high that skepticism is certainly merited). A few
years later, Hansen wrote his doctoral thesis (at the University
of Iowa in 19 65?) in which he agreed that the surface is hot, but
proposed a different mechanism for heating it (from the interior
rather than by sunlight), but with greenhouse gases playing the
same role. The Pioneer 12 mission to Venus in 1978 dropped entry
probes into the atmosphere of Venus which showed directly that
the greenhouse effect — the surface heated by sunlight and the
heat retained by the blanket of air ~ was the operative cause.
I was lucky. But it's Venus that got Hansen thinking about the
greenhouse effect. I know of many other instances where
scientists who cut their teeth on the atmospheres of other worlds
are making important and highly practical discoveries about this
one. The planets are an excellent training ground — requiring
both breadth and depth of knowledge — for future students of the
Earth.
[Now we go to p. 8. . .]
[1990, #13: "Exploring other Worlds and Protecting. . . ••]
buildup of other infrared-absorbing gases (oxides of nitrogen,

methane, those same CFCs, and some other molecules). Some of the
HííT
important recent work on global warming has been done by James
Hansen and his colleagues at the Goddard Institute for Space
Sciences, a NASA facility in New York City.
Hansen and his colleagues point out that over the.last
hundred rage global
temperatu projections
prove correct/ and world ue to be driven up by
the increasin dioxideând other gases in
Earth's atmosphe will/be the warmest year in the
last 120,000.
' the consequences projected by various climatologists
to the middle and end o^the next century include the conversion
of the Soviet Ukraine7' the American Midwest, the breadbasket
of the world, to^something approaching scrub deserts. The slow
volume expansion of sea water, the melting of glacial and polar
ice, and later the collapse of the "West Antarctic ice sheet would
lie inundation &kty on the planet. Now
that's serious. Mitigating this warming will be very expensive.
■"■""""| *i*" piayiHi * i"»j'-r rn1" fr«fr»r*> ^"mmittfos of the
Hawse and Cenóle, convincing them" Lu Lake the threat of global-
warming corious\y. How did Hansen get involved with the issue of
Earth's climatic \future in the first place? As a graduate
student at the University of Iowa he wrote a doctoral thesis that
[1990, #13: "Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting. . ."] 8
attempted imdTstakenly, we nowjcnow) to disprove the contention
that Venus was hot because of a massive greenhouse effect there.

Vertís got Hansen th_inking about the greenhouse effect.
Those who are skeptical about carbon dioxide greenhouse
warming might profitably note the massive greenhouse on Venus,
whese jthe atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide, the surface

pressure is about 90 times that on Earth, and the surface
temperature is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees

Celsius). No one proposes that Venus' runaway greenhouse effect
was caused by Venusians who burned too much coal, drove fuel-
inefficient autos, or cut down their forests. Wiat'o not the
peint.—But the climatological history of our planetary neighbor,

an otherwise Earthlike planet on which the surface became hot
enough to melt tin or lead, is worth considering — especially by
those who say that the increasing greenhouse effect on Earth will
be self-correcting, that we don't really have to worry about it, *r
»#(i *ive»( I***" l«'c»/ l'on, -— 4— A.»"f»

^•0 !L> 14~» * /-^ n
Nuclear IS 0 *. ^>
Nuclear winter is tne^darkening and cooling of the Earth,

mainly from fine smoke particles injected into the atmosphere
from the burning of cities and petroleum facilities that would

follow even a war.
There has been a vigorous scientific debate on just how

serious nuclear winter io likely >fco be. The debate has now
iapgely converged. Meet three-dimensional general circulation

\,Z>\
[4-6-93.at2]
Insert H into 1990:13, "Exploring Other Worlds and

predict that the resulting global temperature will be lower than
in the worst of the Pleistocene ice ages. The consequences for
our global civilization — especially through the collapse of
agriculture — seem very dire. Although it is hard to be certain
about such things, a case can be made that nuclear winter played
some role in convincing the nuclear-armed nations — especially
the Soviet Union — of the futility of nuclear war. Nuclear
winter was first named and calculated [and then we pick up]. . .
models¿now get nearly the same answer, providod thoy uac the same-
starting conditions. U'nut. twnrum- if el nee tn tna rnr-ult.n firrit •
yinnnT""Q<a in 1982/1983 by a team of five scientists, to which I'm
T"Uy w-»rC 3«V#* <¿A«_ «Ctr»*^**
proud to belong/oaüea^ TTAPS (for Richard P. Turco, Owen B.
Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and myself). Of the five
TTAPS scientists, three are nearly full-time planetary
scientists, and the other two have published many papers in
planetary science.
The earliest intimation of nuclear winter came during the
Mariner 9_ mission to Mars, when there was a global dust storm and
we were unable to see the surface of the planet; the infrared
spectrometer on Mariner 9_ found the high atmosphere to be warmer
and the surface colder than it ought to have been. We sat down
and tried to calculate how that could come about. Eventually
this line of inquiry led us from dust storms on Mars to nuclear
winter on Earth.
ffLmmtagy FeibptfiLivc
Planetary science provides a global perspective, a big- w» » ¿f*.
I 9
interdisciplinary picture that turno eut to bo very helpful in
fending and attempting to dofino these looming -climate 6-«Vtr#»menf«'
catastrophes, when you cut your teeth studying other worlds, you
develop a point of view ■ one very uooful in understanding this
world. There are probably other such catastrophes still to be
uncovered. When they emerge, I think it likely that planetary
[1990, #13: "Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting. . . ••] 10
fee jplfcVlVl* « rt '*+f r*-0* T~ ^*rT •
science will rl^Y an imp"*'*"" "*' rn'in 1 in
^'■^«■'■'IMJ J"«I
them.
¡4- 9»««M« >-» t*te
When I look at the evidence, -i find^that planetary
exploration is of the most practical and urgent utility for us
here on Earth. Even if we were not concerned about exploration,
even if we did net have a nanogram of adventuresome spirit in us,
even if we were only concerned for ourselves in the narrowest
sense, planetary exploration would bé superb investment. WA3A—•
«Might- -t-r» maVc fh Í fi 1TI I
[1986, #8: "Let's Go to Mars Together"]
September 6, 1988, 1C, 2C. Reprinted in Space Flight News

(U.K.)/ September, 1988, 20-2ir Excerpted in "Space Race Shaping
Up as International Effort/" by Vince Kohler, Montreal Gazette.
September 27, 1988. Reprinted as appendix in "Reflections on the
Presidential Moon/Márs Initiative," by Carl Sagan, Planetary
Society Background Paper No. 1 (Pasadena, CA: The Planetary
Society, 198!
[Theyfollowing has been transcribed from an enlarged
photocopy of the Parade article. The copy includes three boxes
but nx5 illustrations.]
JÑt s* **"j
In the darkened auditorium of the National Academy of
Sciences in Washington, D.C., the five of them — veterans of
many space missions — reminisced about the silent movie being
projected on the big front screen. With an easy, self-mocking
humor, they described the design of the compatible docking
module, the separate launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and
Tyuratam in the U.S.S.R., the dangerous rendezvous, the
triumphant crawling through the air locks to visit one another,
the exchange of gifts, the camaraderie, and their separate
returns to Earth. Occasionally, a little shyly, they would put
an arm around each other. Many in the audience were struck by
the mutual affection and respect of Lt. Gen. Thomas Stafford,
U.S. Air Force, former commander at Edwards Air Force Base, where
high-performance aircraft are tested, and Maj. Gen. Alexei
[1986, #8: "Let's Go to Mars Together"] 3
u *
Leonov, Soviet Air Force, the first human to walk in space. As
the film ended and the lights came on, there arose from the
sedate audience of engineers and scientists a sound I have rarely
heard — an ovation of such a timbre and intensity that you knew
something deeply felt had been touched in that hard-bitten and
tough-minded audience. ,, • i, « .■ s~-ia i s \
Maybe it was possible after all, you got to thinking.m Maybe
these two nations could work together in their common interest.
Perhaps they could set aside a little of the mutual paranoia and
propaganda, to say nothing of their 55,000 nuclear weapons.
We've been conditioned to think that in the "real" world it could
never happen, that it's too good to be true. But it had happened
in World War II, against a common enemy, and in a small way it
had happened in July 1975, with the Apollo/Soyuz linkup that we
were celebrating.
That linkup, I knew, had its genesis, in large part, in an
idea proposed by Parade back in January 1966. Affirming in an
open letter to President Lyndon Johnson that space should be a
territory for peaceful exploration, not a battleground, Parade
proposed that an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut orbit
the Earth together in a two-man capsule — a demonstration of
superpower cooperation that would transcend political
differences. The response at the time — from readers and
newspaper editors alike — was overwhelmingly positive. Six
years later, in May 1972, President Nixon and Premier Kosygin
signed an agreement providing for U.S.-Soviet cooperation in

exploring space for peaceful purposes, leading to the 1975
Apollo/Soyuz linkup.
Now, here they were, the veterans of that contact between
alien civilizations, describing a mission whose accomplishments,
apart from some worthwhile science, were chiefly in the cause of
human understanding. There was a hunger in that audience — as
Wtf
there 4s- throughout the world — a longing for the two nations to
do something together for a change, something on behalf of the
*«w-«4-li»«¿> 'MUT- w*#*.l/ </-•*•&*. ^re*"/-»»##«
human species^ % Our powers are so great and our accomplishments
so feeble. ghlnK Ut wliaL we muid de together. As the five
astronauts and cosmonauts were given relief maps of the Kasei
Vallis region of Mars, you heard another stirring ovation, and
again the thought arose unbidden: Maybe it was possible after
all. a . *. «* 4».
Mars is the world next door, the nearest planet on which an
astronaut or cosmonaut could safely land. Although it is
sometimes as warm as a New England October, Mars is a chilly
place, so cold that some of its thin carbon dioxide atmosphere
freezes out at the winter pole. ' Theie aro pink ckioa7—fields of
Moulders, innn fmnr't, '7'fl^T rVfifH'l' vrili mm i tnnt ri^rf «nytMnef
onvKarth^ 'a.-ijiy.iE i'niTî m "LlmL would emu; inmost ot Clie UhiLtid '
S&a^fces, ■•"»<'-«•''»•"'' thfif r"^"^"im^'g rrrh hnl r 'li L
ry"tJIJ1 IT ^'M'iinl,
^^trrange bright and dark markings on tho ourface, ltmiintaino ohaped
w\ikc pyramids-, and OUifeti enigmas».
[Broca II, draft 1, 8/12/92]
1984, #33: "The Case/for Mars," Discover 5, (9) (September),

26. Reprinted in L'Europeo. in press. Reprinted in Ark
Foundation Peace Anthology (Emeryville, CA), in press. Reprinted
in Peacemakers yfSeattle: Press for Peace), in press.
[The fallowing has been transcribed from a typescript dated
July 20-/1984.]
Juct neHt deep is another world, LanLdlizliig and uidjubLiur-

<? It is the nearest planet whose surface we can see with a small
telescope. It is the planet, in all the Solar System, most like
the Earth. There have been only two fully successful major
missions to Mars: Mariner 9 in 1971, and Vikings 1 and 2 in
1976. They revealed a world of wonders: a deep rift valley on
Mars that would stretch from New York to San Francisco ; --immense
,aad ancient volcanic lUUuaLains, tho largoat of whigh_toworc—
«0,000 feet above tho average altitude of the Martian s"T-f?«-gf
almost three timea__the height of_ Mount Everest; an intricate
layered structure in and among the polar ices, probably a record
of past climatic change on Mars; bright and dark streaks painted
down on the surface by windblown dust, providing high speed
weather maps of Mars over the past decades and centuries; vast
globe-girdling dust storms that provided the first clues on
nuclear winter, the possible climatic catastrophe that might be
triggered by the soot and dust generated by a nuclear war on
Earth; and enigmatic surface markings and regularly arrayed
'/ fó
[4-3-93.atp]
[Now we have a chapter called, for the moment, "Let's Go to

Mars Together". . . Let's just call it "Mars," as in the Table
of Contents. And in 1984:33, "The Case for Mars" II, which is an
insert into there, there's an insert D, which follows:]
Or perhaps 4 billion years ago on Mars — when conditions were
warmer and wetter and the atmospheric pressure higher — life
arose on Mars, as it did in the same epoch on Earth,
proliferated, evolved, spread to many locales on the planet, and
then, as the climate changed, as the atmosphere thinned, as the
soil became dessicated, as the last oceans and lakes dried up,
life on Mars became extinct. In that case — subsurface, safely
protected from the ultraviolet radiation that today fries the
surface of the red planet — there may be the chemical or fossil
remains of that early life. Perhaps in a rock face exposed by a
landslide, or in the banks of an ancient river valley, or in the
polar, laminated terrain, key evidence for life on another
planet, life different from ours, is waiting.
1984,, #^1; "Tho ^F~ fPy M**-**"]
pyramids on a high plateau — by no means indicative of some

ancient civilization on Mars, but nevertheless worth looking into
in further detail. There are hundreds of sinuous channels dating
back a billion years or so, and clearly indicating a previous
epoch of more benign and Earthlike conditions than prevails in
the tenuous and frigid carbon dioxide atmosphere today. There is
evidence of abundant near-surface liquid water in the past, «nd-
hiniv T ?~rif~rT [rj_n in 1"JTI--II rifif- *aquifBib,N?i», and pmliaps
ovon underground l*lm.a, luduy. The "life detection" experiments
on Viking were designed to detect only a certain subset of
conceivable biologies; the experiments were biased to find the
kind of life about which we know. Nevertheless, the fact that no
signs of life were determined by a variety of different
experiments at two sites 5,000 kilometers apart on a planet
marked by global aeolian transport is at least strongly
suggestive that Mars may be, today at least, a lifeless planet.
But if Mars ¿g lifeless, we have two planets, of virtually
identical age, evolving next door to each other in the same solar
system: Life evolves and proliferates on one, but not on the
other. Why?
This is the classic scientific circumstance of the
0\ e**!**[ i IrÇ
experiment and the control.
[1984, #33: "The Case for Mars"]
Bu£__there—±sr~ânother reason to explore Mars. Although it is

difficult to justify in any derail, many people feel it deeply.
There- is an exploratory,—open-road,—outward-hound spirit that has
wmyV<*H n« frnni rm-r hunt-ei—gatherer days. The detailed
eyploration cf in nnfrn^wn wrlrt -— fry "Thirti^^^d i*")"""vhg( h"j"-

piprrinl1y hy hnmrm hrinrjn—— resonates with something yiuf-oundly
fplt in many "f_Ji^ -^ Trng'Hrr. for example, roving, microbe-free,
smart robots, landing in the safe but dull places and wandering
to view close-up some of that profusion of Martian wonders.
Television images of new terrain and new wonders could grace our
home television sets every day for more than a year. The surface|
area of Mars is almost exactly equal to the land area of the
Earth: It provides an ample arena for a new age of exploration.
And what of human missions to Mars?—Prrnmr nf rhpir C"gt^n
they are yery hard to justify on grounds of science. But/
imagine circumstances in which it might be done for/Other
reasons. Suppose the people of the Earth areône day fortunate
enough to discover^new leaders in Washington and Moscow dedicated
to a new beginning; and to seal thafc^new beginning they embark on
a dramatic joint enterprise —-/Something like the Apollo program
but with cooperation, not/competition, the goal. Major space
missions could also ease the transition in the aerospace industry
from the present/frenzy of military preparations to more benign
activities. >/could we muster a mission tb Mars with human crews
for the sorts of money repeatedly allocatedNfor weapons systems?
I,'6
[^-3-93.atp]
[Then in old 1986:8, "Let's Go to Mars Together," p. 5,

insert E:]
And new technologies look as if they will permit us to experience
what it would be like on Mars without actually going there, until
the operators can put a human presence on Mars. If you are the
operator, you are helmeted and gloved. You turn your head to the
left, the cameras on the Mars rover turn to the left. You take a
step forward, the rover walks forward. You reach out your arm to
pick up something shining in the soil, the robot arm does
likewise. The only difficulty is that this must occur in
incredible slow motion, because the round trip travel time of the
commands from Earth to Mars and the data from Mars to Earth might
take half an hour or more. If the controller was in orbit around
Mars or on one of its small satellites, Phobos or Demos, the
interaction could occur in real time. Also, the data sent back
from Mars could be used in virtual reality. Regions of Mars
would be thoroughly characterized in your helmet and gloves and
boots. You would walk in an empty room on the Earth, but to you
it would be as if you were on Mars, pink skies, fields of
boulders, sand dunes stretching to the horizon, enigmatic
landforms — all an exact copy of what is on Mars, from the
safety of a virtual reality salon [better word?] in your
hometown.
[4-3-93.atp]
No, sending humans to Mars must: have a different

justification. In the 1980s, it seemed to me a coherent
justification was for these two nations that had put the entire
planet at risk to show that they could do something
cooperatively, something on behalf of the human species, a high-
technology endeavor that would give hope to people all over the
planet. We imagined a kind of Apollo program in reverse, in
which cooperation, not competition, was the objective, in which
the two leading spacefaring nations would together lay the
groundwork for a major advance in human history — the eventual
settlement of another planet.
/ I
[milMiilrn from "Thr tilft nf-Trptrllo" (3, 7/?f)/T}]J
s[An i ir ir rf i ] *^*\-- '•■",*r~ Cx
But why Mars? Why not return to the Noon? It's much
closer, and we've proved we know how to send people there.
Yes, but I'm concerned that the Noon is a long detour, If
not a dead end. We've been there. We've even brought some of it
back. People have seen the Noon rocks, and, for reasons that I
believe are fundamentally sound, they are bored by the Noon. It
is a static, airless, waterless, dead world.
Nars, by contrast, has weather, dust storms, its own moons,
immense volcanoes, ,sprisnnally varying polar ice caps, enigmatic
landforms, and ancient river valleys indicating that massive
climatic change has occurred on a once-Earthlike world. -Mars» "2T/-
■aloc holds some prospect of past or possibly even present life.
None of this is true for the Noon. Nor is the Noon an especially
desirable test bed or way station for Nars. The Martian and
lunar environments are very different, and the Moon is as distant
from Nars as is the Earth. The machinery for Martian exploration
can better be tested in Earth orbit or on the Earth itself.
Among these many wonders and delignts are the channels. The
surface of Mars is covered with hundreds of ancient river
valleys, carved out in a more clement time when liquid water
flowed across the Martian landscape. Not only were there rivers
then, but also lakes and (possibly) oceans. When, in 1976, the
two Viking landers set dfdwn on Mars, no sign of life was
uncovered — no footprints, no artifacts, no trees or bushes or
desert coneys or microbes, not even so much as a complex organic
molecule. But what seems certain is that a billion years ago,
when the waters flowed, the chances of life were much greater on
that wetter/and warmer Mars. If we could wander down one of the
sinuous valleys and examine the geological stratifications in the
banks,/we might discover much — about climate change and the
origan and evolution of life, and about the comparative
ivelopments of sister worlds.
Mars beckons, a storehouse of scientific information —
important in its own right but also for the light it may cast on
the environment of our own planet. If Mars once had abundant
liquid water, what went wrong? How did an Earthlike world become
so parched, frigid, and comparatively airless? Is there
«nmeth i ng here we should know about our own planet? .
^ t^J. u)—* THe.e t «neta?/-v •*rl***TM
K,
We humans have been this way before. - ' '^'-+T "rr frl'in w
would have understood the call of Mars. But mere scientific
exploration does not require a human presence. We can always
•frr «f-Uy /•*'«/- -A*/¿ l«c4-
send smart robots. They are -amok* cheaper, and you can take more *
*«* C»n «»»^ */-!»*». 4* inútil *i*r« ^«n^ytx*** /f>l«t*s
Y
lier.
» Mars? Why not jointly feed the
', or do water reclamation projects in
Àtes and the Soviet Union could, if
house, educate, provide medical care
ngly self-reliant every citizen of the
. and the U.S.S.R. have no such precedent;
essed by the pursuit of short-term competitive
itical realities, sadly, are that a joint
ike\Apollo/Soyuz, is well within the realm of
ile many worthy and more mundane
But a major cooperative success in
space/can serve as an inspiration and spearhead for joint
enterprises on Earth.
Mwieuvtii'" °r;""' 1"iej,w" haïra -m ¡Mi^ ni i i, rnhrjjdiary
advantage! TRay use precisely the same aerospace, electronics,
rocket, and even nuclear technologies as dees the nuclear arms
race. There is a perception, enunciated most clearly by
President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, that the
marriage of high technology and the military establishment
creates an arms-race juggernaut that is almost impossible to turn
off and that may destroy us all. An alternative program using
the same industries and some military skills for peaceful
purposes might be a very good thing; it is foolish to have
powerful vested interests — jobs, careers, profits, dividends —
mainly dependent upon a continuing arms race. Expeditions to

the planets use the same high technology, and the traditional
military virtues of organization and valor, in a humane and
benign cause.
/oVages by humans to Mars simultaneously engage many
different constituencies: technological, scientific,
exploratory, military, and industrial, as/Well as the many who
wish to see\significant, balanced cooperation between the United
States and the Soviet Union. Some people feel the lure of Mars
simply as the future calling. A/foint Mars project excites both
visionaries andpractical engineers, crosses national and
ideological boundaries, and/even — as I discovered at a meeting
of scientists and world /religious leaders in Italy — has a
powerful and ecumenical religious appeal. There is, it seems, a
tide rising.
House-Senate/Joint Resolution 236, spearheaded by Sen. Spark
Matsunaga of Hawaii, was\passed by both houses of Congress and
signed into /aw by President Reagan on October 30, 1984 (Public
Law 98-562J. It explicitly\describes joint U.S./Soviet
activities in space as an alternative to "an arms race in space,
which As in the interest of no\one." Subsequent resolutions
proposed in the Senate by Matsunaga discuss "joint East-West
Majiss-related activities, inciting an unmanned Mars sample return
ind all activities that might c\ntr\ibute to an international
manned mission to Mars."
\,l(e
[4-3-93.atp]
[In 1984:33, "The Case for Mars," insert G, p. 4:]

We succeeded in Interesting Soviet scientists in such a joint
endeavor. Roald Sagdeev, then director of the Institute for
Space Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, was
already deeply engaged in international cooperation on Soviet
robotic missions to Venus, Mars, and Halley's Comet, long before
the idea was fashionable. The use of the Soviet Mir space
station and the Saturn y-class Soviet launch vehicle Energiva
made cooperation attractive to the Soviet organizations that
manufactured these items of hardware and that were otherwise
having difficulty justifying their wares. Through a sequence of
arguments, the end of the Cold War being chief among them, then-
Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was convinced. At the 198x
Washington summit, Gorbachev — asked what was the most important
joint activity by which the two countries could make a clear
change in their relationship — unhesitatingly replied, "Let's go
to Mars together."
But the Reagan Administration was not interested.
Cooperating with the Soviets, using Soviet technology that was
more advanced than American technology, making some American
technology available to the Soviets, sharing credit, providing an
alternative for the arms manufacturers — these were not to their
liking. The offer was turned down. Mars would have to wait.
[4-3-93.atp]
But in only a f«w years times have greatly changed. The

Soviet Union is no more. The Cold War is over. The argument
about the importance of the two nations working together has lost
at least some of its force. Other nations — especially Japan
and the European Space Agency — have become spacefaring nations.
There are other just and pressing demands on the discretionary
budgets of all these nations.
But the Eneraiva heavy-lift vehicle and the Mir space
station still exist. Despite considerable political turmoil, the
Russian space program continues vigorously. Cooperation between
Russia and America In space is accelerating. U.S. astronauts
will visit Mir. Russian cosmonauts will fly on a shuttle. An
American instrument is to be carried by a Soviet space vehicle to
Mars. Russian scientists are experimenters on the American Mars
Observer orbiter. The American and Russian capabilities in space
science and technology mesh, interdigitate. Cooperation between
the two programs is a marriage made in heaven — but one still
surprisingly difficult to consummate. The first human mission to
Mars is now probably too expensive for any one nation to pull
off. But a cooperative venture among the United States, Russia,
Japan, the European Space Agency — and perhaps other nations,
such as China — makes sense.
[1984, #33: "The Case for Mars"]
'Aetoftishiinjl,y, the answer seems te be yes. -

T1..H.H ii/¡l]pij V|ftlmj lmH«i. ii^rocoiff a symbolic first
rrnc,"i " ' nf 11 iv 1111 nil 111 i[r 'ir', rn annj-frpr planet. They are
.T-cmi-inrirr*T of vlint r 1 r in pn--jb1r for MB The same technology
that propels apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent

could also enable the first human voyage to another planet. —By „
m n ininn
jnn iiiparg i « gnr.H a micei^ to Mars the only — <">r "*" Y r
evan the boot ■ use uf Lhe Money we could save if we stepped

h*crfr frnm the hrinlr nf rmrlrnv nnri i "hi 1 n1 ¡MITT—tjur under uerba-in.
nt a real choice of fitting mythic

power: to embrace either the planet named after, or the madness
ascribed—ta, the ancient god of war.

i close appr much/easier and just
be launched te is significant —
anniversary an Revolution,
Ls also the íversary of Christopher
of what carae^ propitiously, to be called the
the ginal motivations were for the age of
exploration that Columbus ushered in, the net result has been, in
a painful historical/process now nearing completion, the linking
of the continents/the unification of the world. What could be
more fitting for 19.92 than the initiation of an international
program for/the exploration and eventual settlement of another
Perhaps by\l992 the nations would merely begin
-orbit the components of the spacecraft
Humans to Mars. By 1992, the U.S. Space
Station is supposed to be ready.
If we take this path, there will come a time — perhaps «at-
teho dawn of the new century and the new millennium — when *he» «^
interplanetary spacecraft will be assembled in Earth orbit, the
progress in full view on the evening news. Astronauts and
cosmonauts, hovering like gnats, will guide and mate the
prefabricated parts. The day will come when the ship is tested
and ready, boarded by its international crew, and boosted to
escape the Earth's gravity. For the whole of the voyage to Mars
and back, the lives of the Amorioan crew members will depend on
■their Oevict counterparts and vue, vei'sa, a microcosm of the
actual situation down here on Earth. Perhaps the first joint

manned (and womanned) mission will be only a flyby of Mars.
ReiliapsJ robot vehicles will than (MI emlim), with ^parachutes
and retrorockets, gently set down on the Martian surface to
collect samples and return them to Earth. But eventually -***—
'tí3^wiíl^2<Uli~i£--"í7e^"^^ humans will set foot on the planet
Mars. X* ,'S **\y * Kt-AAr- ,4j tÛil .
According to solemn treaty, signed in Washington and Moscow

on January 27, 1967, and ratified by the Senate and the
President, no nation may lay claim to part or all of another
planet. Nevertheless — for good historical reasons that
Columbus would have understood well — people are concerned about
who first sets foot on Mars. If this really worries us, we can
arrange for the ankles of the >Amorican and OuviuL luimudiiJers to
be tied together as they alight in the gentle Martian gravity.
Bnt tnrrr wmilii br mnrh fp rip in jiii , mil IIIIJ imhnl1r
gocturesT The crews would acquire new and previously sequestered

samples, in part to search for life, in part to understand the
past and future of Mars and Earth. They would experiment, for
later expeditions, on extracting water, oxygen, and hydrogen from
the hydrated rocks and sand and from the underground permafrost -
- to drink, to breathe, to power their machines and, as rocket
fuel, for the return to Earth. They would test out Martian
materials for eventual bases and settlements on Mars.
) i yfû
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert N into 1986:8, "Let's 60 to Mars Together," p. 12:

Once some of us are out there on the planets, living off the
land, bringing up new generations of humans on other worlds,
something will have changed forever in human history. In the
long term we will have bases and homesteads on asteroids and
moons throughout the Solar System, until, tiptoeing through the
Oort Cloud, comet to comet, we will be on our way to the stars.
This is of course a very long-term enterprise. We may not see
the first footfall of humans on another planet in our lifetimes.
It does not imply abandoning the Earth; the Earth is not a
disposable planet, and for a very long time into the future only
a small fraction of the human species will be out there. But in
the long run, unless we destroy ourselves, we will go. The
Universe extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a
brief hiatus in our global, technical civilization, we will
resume our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants,
arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond,
will look back to our time as a key nexus in the development of
our species and will remember those who made it possible. [Use
this to end chapter? To end book?]
peaceful, more cooperative, more forward-looking, and more humane

planet Earth." -^Thomas Paine, Chairman, U.S. National
Commission on/Space and former NASA Administrator, at the
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics/Planetary
Society Conference, "Steps to Mars," Washington, D.C., July 16,
198!
* * *
BOX:
Astronauts: Envoys of Mankind
In the 1967 Outer Space treaty, the United States and the
Soviet Union pledge not to introduce nuclear or other weapons of
mass destruction in Earth orbit or on any other celestial body.
The treaty prohibits military bases or weapons testing of any
sort on the Moon and planets. The nations are to "facilitate and
encourage international cooperation" in the scientific
exploration of the Moon and planets and "shall regard astronauts
as envoys of mankind." Joint activities on other planets are
explicitly encouraged by Article 1 of the treaty, which reads in
its entirety: "The exploration and use of outer space, including
the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the
benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of
their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be
the province of mankind."
* *
BOX:
What You Can Do
The 100,000-member Planetary Society has been a leading

advocate of joint human expie/ration of Mars. This organization
is entirely membership-supported. For further information about
the Society and its Mars Fund, write:
• The Planetary Society, Dept. P, 65 N. Catalina Ave.,
Pasadena, CA 91106
Letters about joint human exploration of Mars should be sent

to the National Commission on Space, which is currently preparing
a recommendation to fixe President about future U.S. space
exploration:
• National Commission on Space, Dept. P, 490 L'Enfant Plaza

East, S.W., Washington, DC 20024.
Readers also may write to:
• Sen. Slade Gorton, Chairman, Subcommittee on Science,
Technology, ^nd Space, U.S. Senate, Room Hart 427, Washington, DC
20510
Ret». Bill Nelson, Chairman, Subcommittee on Space Science

and Applications, U.S. House of Representatives, Room 2321
J&0
[4-3-93.atp]
[Now we go to what used to be called "Why Send Humans to

Mars," your 1991:4, now called (and let's make the appropriate
changes of titles in the Table of Contents) "Can We Justify a
Human Mission to Mars?": insert I:]
Ever since the United states beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, a
coherent justification for humans in space has been lacking.
Presidents and Congressional committees became puzzled about what
to do about the manned space program. What was it for? Why did
we need it? But the exploits of the astronauts and moon landings
had excited — and for good reason — large numbers of people all
over the world. It would be a betrayal of these people and a
rejection of that great American technological achievement to
back off from manned space flight. Also, the first law of
bureaucracy is to guarantee the continuance of the bureaucracy.
Left to its own devices, without clear instructions from above,
NASA gradually devolved into a program that would maintain jobs
and perquisites of power. Pork barrel politics became an
increasingly powerful motivator. NASA had lost its way.
hW
[4-3-93.atp]
[Now insert H:]

And yet the Space Exploration Initiative, despite clear
direction from the top, went exactly nowhere. Four years after
it was mandated, it does not even have an office at NASA
dedicated to it. Small and inexpensive lunar robotic missions —
that otherwise might well have been approved — were canceled by
Congress because of guilt by association with SEI. What went
wrong?
One problem is the time scale. SEI extended. . .
I,/?
[4-3-93.atp]
[Insert J:]
Third, the program was conceived exclusively in nationalist
terns. Cooperation with other nations was not fundamental to the

design or execution of the program. Vice President Quayle, who
had some nominal responsibility for space, justified the space

N
station as a demonstration that the United states was the
world's only superpower." But since the Soviet Union had an

operational space station that was a decade or SO ahead of the
United States, Mr. Quayle's argument proved diI I icult to follow.
H.
a fBroca II, draft 1, 8/12/92]
w.
3.QQ1, #4i
.1901, pil Ttiimînk Lu-Mara?," Issues ill science
#41- "Why Send bl!lenC¡ ¿ltd—
>*7 "?
■ Techneloctrj OiniilU 1U¥1, KU-MbT
On July 20, 1989, the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11

landing on the Moon, President Bush announced a long-term
direction for the U.S. Space Program. Called the Space
Exploration Initiative (SEI), it proposera sequence of goals
that includes a space station, a return of humans to the Moon,
and then the first landing of human beings on Mars. In a m&ze- ¿¿r-e*
reuunt statement, Mr. Bush JMB set 2019 as the target date for
the first footfall on that planetjffi •*,ï* H ~>
reoiiuuiUiëflL. IL tuiUmds five or so presidential terms of office

into the future, assuming the average presidency is one and a
half terms. That makes it easy for a President to attempt to
commit his successors, but leaves in question, how reliable such a
commitment might be.
Second, there 4s concern about whether NASA, which has'
recently experienced great difficulty lifting a few astronauts
200 miles above the Earth — as well as other well-publicized
problems — «an safely send astronauts on an arcing year-long
ctory to a destination 100 million miles or more away.
And finally, there *is the question of where, in terms of
practical politics, the money •*« supposed to come from. The
costs for SEI have been variously estimated, ranging as high as
i I \,n-
I :
['4-3-93. atp]
[Insert L:]
For all these reasons, SEI was a non-starter. It was stillborn.
There was no effective attempt by the Bush Administration to
spend political capital to get SEI going.
The lesson to me seems clear: There may be no way to send
humans to Mars in the comparatively near future — despite the
fact that it is entirely within our technological capability. If
we are able to go, the mission must be international from the
beginning, with costs and responsibilities equitably shared; the
cost must be made much less; the time from approval to launch
must fit within practical political time scales; and NASA must
demonstrate a significant improvement in its recent ability to
muster pioneering exploratory missions with human crews safely,
on time, and on budget. If it were possible to imagine such a
mission for less than $100 billion, and for approval to launch
taking less than 15 years, maybe such a mission would be
feasible. (In terms of cost, this would represent only a small
fraction of the budget of the present spacefaring nations over
the interval of time suggested.) And it's beginning to look as
if both this budget and this time scale might be practical.
But the cheaper and quicker the mission is, necessarily the
more risk we must be willing to take with the lives of the
astronauts and cosmonauts aboard. And no budget, no timeline can
be really reliable when we attempt to do something on such a
[4-3-93.atp]
grand scale that has never been done before. The more leeway we
ask, the greater is the cost and the longer it takes to get to
Mars.
It's not enough to go to Mars because some of us have dreamt
of doing so since childhood, because it seems to us the obvious
long-term exploratory goal for the human species. If we're
talking about spending this much money, ve must justify the
expense. And if we cannot do so, we should not go.
'/ l\h\
[4-3-93.atp]
[Insert K into 1991:4, p. 2:]

whether you pre-emplace supplies from Earth and only launch
humans to Mars if the supplies ere safely landed; whether you
plan to use Martian materials to generate oxygen to breathe,
water to drink, and rocket fuel and propellants to get home;
whether you land using the thin Martian atmosphere for
deceleration;
[1991, #4: "Why Send Humans to Mars?"]
$500 billion.
(fan j IWHH i»im <•« r-^-Y-^g-gj th¡f+" f *■ * - impossible to estimate
costs before you have a mission design. And the mission design
depends on such matters as the size of the crew; the extent to
which you take mitigating steps against possible solar and cosmic
radiation hazards, or zero gravity; and what risks you consider
#"Ç i-ktft m*n Any uspm***
acceptable with the lives on board. Other relevant uncertainties
are*the amount of redundancy in equipment; the extent to which
you want to use closed ecological systems or just depend on the
food, water, and waste disposal facilities you've brought with
«Vi-»*» Si^K
you; the design of roving vehicles for the Martian landscape; and
what technology you carry to test the ability to live off the
land for later voyages.
Clearly, these issues powerfully affect cost, and until they
are decided it is absurd to accept any figure for the cost of the
program. On the other hand, it is equally clear that the program
•will be extremely expensive.C±acs--*Ji_£s-
The Gall of Ham

""Sor me, Mars has been calling since childhood. Voyages to
other worlds seem to me the natural continuation of the long
history of human exploration. The Earth itself, except for the
sea bottoms, is iww all explored. At this same moment, our
technology permits us to go to other worlds. So of course that's
where we'll go, soonerNjr later.
In the long term, self-sustaining human communities on other

worlds^ would be a step more significant than the colonization of
the lano^ by our amphibian ancestors some 500 million years ago,
he descent from the trees by our primate ancestors some 5 to
10 million Years ago. It would be a transforming event in human
history, in the history of life on Earth. But that doesn't mean
it has to happen today, it will also be a transforming event if
it happens 100 years from now.
I have been advocating human missions to Mars with some
With the Planetary Society's "Mars
Declaration" it became\clear that a stunningly ecumenical group
of American leaders alsoX supported such a program, and after a
short time we found that the Soviets were embracing it as well.
Human exploration of Mars xs prominent in the 10 stated long-term
technological goals of the u\s.S.R., and President Gorbachev on a
number of occasions has announced that he would like to pursue it
jointly with the United StatesA
What I had in mind, in the height of the Reagan "evil
empire" days, was to establish a common constructive goal for the
nuclear superpowers as a means of binding the two nations
together, and sharing a purpose of truly historic proportions.
The trouble is that the world has not remained static. New
developments have emerged. The first isVhat the U.S. and Soviet
economies are in much worse shape than was\generally recognized
in the Reagan years, and either nation's ability to spend
enonious amounts of money on such a goal is/rtow a relevant

guestioi
Also,\a joint human mission tO/Mars was promoted as a way of
creating a snared and worthy <
adversaries; bu\ the Cold War/is now over. In fact, U.S./Soviet
relations have recently be,en at their warmest point since the end
of World War II. Th\ two nations still have some 55,000 nuclear
weapons between them/ though, 25,000 of which are in hair-trigger
readiness; and it £s therefore possible that benign shared
objectives exte ing decades \nto the future are still very
important for/the well-being of\£he global civilization,
I don' believe that the increased budgetary problems and
the thawing of the Cold War are significant enough changes to
actua y scuttle the case for going to>Mars. But they do work,
at/least incrementally, to weaken the argument.
H
My r>T.m nhiof mi<zgjy\j^rj ie that, ¿here are now other matters -
- clear, crying national needs — that cannot be addressed

without major expenditures; while, at the same time, there is an
extremely limited discretionary federal budget. Such matters
include the disposal of chemical and radioactive wastes, energy
efficiency, alternatives to fossil fuels, declining rates of
technological innovation, the collapsing urban infrastructure,
the AIDS epidemic, homelessness, malnutrition, infant mortality,
education — there is a painfully long list, and money is needed
to address all of these matters, which endanger the well-being of
[4-3-93.atp]
*?
Insert: M; "a'11 Indicate where it goes":

(I can't get-it out of my head -- that with the money stolen in
the U.S. Savings and Loan scandal, we could have gone to Mars and
opened a new kind of future for the human species.)
[1991, #4: "Why Send Humans to Mars?"] 5
the nation.
Nearly every one of these matters could cost hundreds of
billions of dollars, or more, to address. Indeed, alternatives
to the fossil-fuel economy clearly represent a multitrillion-
dollar investment, if we can do it. And every now and then there
are unexpected little fiscal perturbations provided by private
and public corruption, such as the savings and loan scandal, r 1
having Muilüy-
If there were 20 percent more discretionary funds in the (jt- S
federal budget,AI probably would not feel so worried about
advocating such enormous expenditures in space. If there were 20
percent less, I don't think the most diehard space enthusiast
would be advocating anything like SB*. If, to take a more
extreme example, half the people in the Sudan are in immediate
danger of starvation, a conscientious board of directors of the
Khartoum Art Museum will not be advocating increased government
expenditure to purchase art — no matter how convinced they are
of the social benefits of art. You can have life without art,
but not vice versa. Surely there is some point at which the
national economy is in such dire straits that sending people to
Mars is unconscionable. The only difference there might be
between me and other enthusiasts for human missions to other
worlds is where we draw the line. But surely such a line exists,
and every participant in such a debate should stipulate where
6 '***■ 1t«/i>n« f
that line should be drawn, what fraction of the 6NP, for space is
too much.
If\e're talking about a relative^y'minor increment to the
NASA budget\in order to accomplisfcrsEI, then perhaps it's
inappropriate to make zerq^stun arguments. But if we advocate,
say, $300 billion\peirt for SEI, that's $300 billion unavailable
for other pressing national needs. That amount is essentially
the present"NASA budgetNievoted exclusively to SEI for the next
20 years. If the cost of SEI is to be added on, then we're
liking about doubling the NAS^ budget.
So if we are convinced that sending'humans to Mars is
important for the human future, the/key to getting there is to
save money. For example, some jaropóse that with alternative
technologies and more lenient bureaucratic restrictions, quick,
dirty, and incredibly cheap missions of humans to the Moon and
Mars are possible. Iirthe review panels I'm familiar with —
including the white^House/National Space Council "Blue Ribbon"
Committee on the/President's Human Exploration Initiative, as it
was then (November 1989) called — such proposals have been
thought stimulating but somewhere between unconvincing and
specious/ Nevertheless, there might be new technologies, missed
by a hidebound NASA, that could produce enormous savings. If
suchr technologies are mature and accessible, they may be critical
in sending humans to Mars in the next few decades.
Failing this, the only way for the/United States to go is to

do it cooperatively. NASA would theii commit to something like
SEI, but scale back substantially/on such technologies as space
stations and heavy-lift vehicles, where substantial capability is
in hand in other countries y£ especially, the Soviet union. If
the cost of going to Mars/were shared equally among, say, the
Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, Japan, and the united
States, the cost for/each nation might become low enough for the
project to be feasible. Without such cooperation, the program
may remain wholly infeasible.
I must confess to being perplexed by those who assert that
such cooperation can never be accomplished, or if it can, we will
not save any money because of interface and communications
problems./ If this is the only way we can get to Mars, we should
be devoting substantial technical, bureaucratic, and social
resources to finding ways to resolve such difficulties. If the
Cold'War could be made to wind down, if some semblance of true
democracy could be introduced in Eastern Europe, we can solve
interface and communications problems.
fhe Gtaiidaid JubL-iliuaticm"

But beyond discussions of costs, even reduced costs, we must
also identify benefits. And since there are major and valid
social and environmental demands on the discretionary federal
budget, it seems to me that advocates of -€SX have to address
-Vérû^ V^
[4-6-93.at2] ^\W\\ 4-, "uatVC^
[There's a place — maybe it's in "Explorers" — where we're

talking about the alleged spinoff benefits of NASA. I listed
some technologies — cardiac pacemakers, stickless frying pans —
that allegedly were produced by NASA technology, but they
weren't. Add: ballpoint pens.] ^> /*
[After the pacemaker remark, put:] (I had the opportunity
to talk with the inventor of the cardiac pacemaker, who himself
almost had a coronary in describing to me the injustice of giving
NASA the credit for his invention.)
[And let's add the following:] ^s \p
Of course it would be impossible for so much new technology to be
developed as is necessary for NASA and not to have some spillover
into the general economy, some inventions useful down here.
There have been some, but they hardly justify doing what NASA
does. We could see the same thing in the waning days of the
Reagan-era Star Wars office. X-ray lasers on orbiting battle
stations will help develop laser surgery, it was argued. If we
need laser surgery, I say, by all means let's allocate the funds
for it. But leave Star Wars out of it. Spinoff justifications
for a government program constitute a clear admission that that
program can't stand on its own two feet, cannot be justified by
the purpose under which it was advertised.
The argument is specious for other reasons as well, one of

which is that Teflon technology preceded Apollo. The same is
true of cardiac pacemakers, ana other purported spinoffs of the
if "
Apollo program. But the central point here is that if there are
A
some technologies that we urgently need, then spend the money on
developing them. Why go to Mars to do it?
A Then there is education, an argument that has proved very
attractive in the White House. Doctorates in science peaked
somewhere around the time of Apollo 11, maybe even with the
proper phase lag after the beginning of the Apollo program. The
cause-and-effect relationship is perhaps «e%„demonstrated but
it's not implausible. But so what? If we are interested in
improving education, is going to Mars the best route? Think of
what we could do with $100 billion in terms of teachers' training
and salaries, school laboratories and libraries, scholarships for
disadvantaged students, research facilities, and graduate
fellowships. Is it really true that the best way to promote
science education is to go to Mars?
Another argument is that GEfr will give the military-
industrial complex something approaching worthy work, thereby
diffusing the temptation to use its considerable political muscle
to exaggerate external threats and pump up defense funding. The
other side of this coin is that by going to Mars we maintain a
standby technological capacity that might be important for future
military contingencies. Of course, we might simply ask those
Aii^w +•
guys to do something directly useful for the civilian economy.

But as we saw with Grumman buses and Boeing/Vertol commuter
trains, the aerospace industry experiences real difficulty in
producing competitively for the civilian economy.
There are other justifications offered feoi- DEI. It is
argued that the ultimate solution to world energy problems is to
strip-nine the Moon down to a depth of a few microns, return the
solar-wind-implanted Helium-3 back to Earth, and use it in fusion
reactors. What fusion reactors? Even if this were possible, it
is a technology 50 or 100 years away. Our energy problems need
to be solved at a less leisurely pace.
Even stranger is the argument that we have to send human
beings into space in order to solve the population crisis ên>
-Garth. But 250,000 more people are born than die every day —
which means that we would have to launch 250,000 people per day
into space to maintain the present world population. This
appears to be somewhat beyond NASA's present capability.
Finally, there is a set of less tangible arguments, many of
which, I freely admit, I find attractive and resonant. The idea
of an emerging cosmic perspective, of understanding our place in
the Universe, of a highly visible program affecting our view of
ourselves — this might have extremely important benefits for us
in clarifying the fragility of our planetary environment and in
recognizing the common peril and responsibility of all the /** "2" I^H«^
nations and peoples of Earth. *tl would provide exciting,
exploratory, adventure-rich, and hopeful prospects for young

people who are ordinarily provided by the mass media and by the
incompetence and corruption of politicians with the most dismal
view of what their future might be.
mi*»
I've«mentioned the importance — somewhat diminished with
the end of the Cold War, but still very great — of binding the
(J united Etfttgg find th? TT *5 ?■!* in a grand, long-term common
endeavor.
if ]i
And then there is the "because-it's-there" argument: Mt.
Everest explored by robots would have arousjedT minimal public
enthusiasm, but when humans first conquered it, that was another
story. Maybe. But robotic technology is going to make enormous
progress in the next few décades. Imagine, for example,
comprehensive data from several sites on Hers used to construct a
i virtual rjaality — so that many people on Earth could
. and tactile sensation of walking on and exploring
i appropriate data processing, it is possible that
robotirc missions will, by 2019, generate public appeal fully
competitive with human missions.
Another argument, used by President Bush, suggests that it
is human destiny, manifest destiny, or maybe just American
destiny to go to other worlds. Well, it's a very brave person
who claims to know what is written in the book of destiny. This
is essentially a religious argument, and not everyone is an
adherent of fehia faith.
When I run through such a list and try to add up the pros
and cons, bearing in mind the other urgent demands on the federal
budget, to me it all comes down to this question: Can the sum of
a large number of individually inadequate justifications and some
powerful but intangible justifications add up to an adequate
j ust i f icat ion?
I don't think any of the items on my list of purported
justifications is demonstrably worth $500 billion, certainly not
in the short term. On the other hand, every one of them is worth
I
something and if I have 10 items and each of them is worth $£0
I
billion, maybe it adds up to $#00 billion. If we can be clever
about reducing costs and making true international partnership
work, the justifications become more compelling. I don't know
how to do this calculus, but it saatna to mo» that this is the kind
of issue we ought to be addressing.
nl-njll fill IIIa HoV¿>--inr* MntT
Until a national debate on this topic has transpired, until

we have a better idea of the rationale and the cost/benefit ratio
of «SI, what should we do? My suggestion is that we pursue n&D-
projects that can be justified on their own merits or their
relevance to other goals^ and that can also contribute to human
missionsto Mars fcic in publiohcd article] should we^decide to
go. Such an agenda would include:
• U.S. astronauts on the Soviet space station Mir for joint

flights of gradually increasing duration, aiming at one to two
years.
• Reconfiguration of the proposed U.S. space station Freedom
to study the long-term effects of the space environment on
humans, and make maximum use of knowledge gained from Mir.
• Early implementation of a rotating or tethered "artificial
gravity" module on Mir or Freedom.
• Enhanced studies of the Sun, including a distributed set
of probes in heliocentric orbit, to monitor solar activity and
give the earliest possible warning to astronauts of hazardous
solar flares.
• Development of a nonreusable heavy-lift vehicle. Present
launchers cannot even duplicate the successes of the 1976 Viking
and the 1977 Voyager missions, and the shuttle is inadequate and
unsafe as the workhorse for -6EÏ-» •»**<-U •*7„ m •'» * i'ct» .
• U.S./Soviet and multilateral development of Eneraiya

technology for the U.S. and international space programs.
Although the United States is unlikely to depend primarily on a
Soviet booster rocket, Eneraiya has roughly the lift of the
Saturn V that sent the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. The United
States let the Saturn V assembly line die, and it cannot readily
be resuscitated, ghe UtS.S»R. is eager to sell Eneraiya
technology for hard currency.
• Vigorous pursuit of joint projects with NASDA (the

Japanese space agency) and Tokyo University; the European Space
Agency; and .GLAVCOSMQS ■[CIAV 0961100?] /the -Coviofc Space êncyfr
ind the UiCiC.R. Aeademy of Scionoos; along with Canada and other
nations. In many cases these should be equal partnerships, not
the United states calling the shots. They could range from joint
working groups for choosing landing sites on Mars to joint
missions in low-Earth orbit. One of the chief objectives should
be to build a tradition of cooperative competence.
• Technological development ~ using state-of-the-art
robotics and artificial intelligence — of rovers, balloons, and
aircraft for the exploration of Mars, and implementation of the
first international rover/return sample mission.
• Vigorous pursuit of new technologies such as constant-
thrust propulsion to get us quickly to Mars; this may be
essential if the radiation or microgravity hazards make one- to
two-year flight times too risky.
• Intensive study of near-Earth asteroids, which may provide
preferable intermediate-timescale goals for human exploration
than does the Moon.
• A greater emphasis on science — including the fundamental
sciences behind space science, and the thorough reduction and
analysis of data already obtained ~ by NASA and other space
agencies.
Tho above recommendations add up to a tiny fraction of the

full cost of flfiï, but if implemented, they would help us to make
•y*
accurate cost estimates and better assessment of SEUs dangers
and benefits. They would permit us to maintain a vigorous pace
toward human missions to Mars without prematurely committing to
the specific hardware of those missions. Most, perhaps all, of
these recommendations have strong justifications, even if we were
sure we were unable to send humans to any other planet in the
next few decades.
In the meantime, the most important step we can take toward
Mars is to make significant progress on Earth. Achieving even
modest improvements in the serious social, economic, and
political problems that our global civilization now faces could
release enormous resources, both material and human, for
furthering space exploration and other worthy goals.
[1988, #27: "Mars: Back to the Frontier"]
exploration, turning hatred aria suspicion into cooperation

suggests a hopeful answer.
Xring the Washington summit last December, General
Secretary\Gorbachev vas asked what could be done to heal the
wounds that^divide/our two nations. His immediate answer was a
joint U.S./Soviet human expedition to Mars. With prior and
subsequent endorsements of the idea by leading Presidential
candidates/of both parties, a bill passed by the House to begin
establishing the bureaucratic machinery for joint Mars
exploration, and a stunningly ecumencial range of American
leaders signing the Mars Declaration, there seems to be a chance
nf «rrhn-illy -!<■ 11 i .. u i IIIJ ll\k nrpaii in T-Tio npvr run rtt*r:artf>çi.
There's plenty of housework to be done here on Earth, and

our commitment to it must be steadfast. But we're the kind of
species that needs a frontier. Every time humanity stretches
itself, turns a new corner, it receives a jolt of productive
vitality that can last for centuries or millennia.
There's a new world next door. And we know how to get
there.
("Broca II, draft 1, 8/12/92]
1991, #6: "When Worlds Collide," Parade. March 3, 1991, 4-

/
6. Reprinted in SIRS (Social Issues Resource Series) Science
Series: Physical Science, in press. Reprinted in Abril (Rio de
Janeiro), in press.
[Photograph captions:]
"Sometime in the 21st century: As a small asteroid passes
nearby, it is greeted by explorers from Earth. An astronaut
peers into a large crater produced by an ancient collision. If
an asteroid this size or .larger were to hit the Earth, the
consequences would be catastrophic. There are, however, steps we
can take to prevent it/. (Painting by Don Davis.)"
"Mimas, a moon of Saturn. The impact that excavated the
large crater Herschel nearly blew Mimas to bits. (Voyager 1
photograph.)"
"The rings óf Saturn seen be Voyager ¿. Ring material may
have been produced when moons were shattered in collisions with
comets."
"A collision between a rocky and an organic-rich asteroid in
the main asteroid belt. A few of the fragments may eventually
strike th? Earth, where they are called meteorites. (Painting by
William R. Hartmann.)"
[Heading above title on page 4, in all caps:] "The

Beginnings and Ends of Worlds"
1991, #6: "When Worlds Collide"]
[Tmrt nf nrtinlar qiintntion mnrlrn nmitfrid;]—-

There's something funny about Saturn. When, in 1610,
Galileo used the world's first astronomical telescope to view the
planet — then the most distant world known — he found something
vary peculiars—Thorc seemed to be an appendage on either side,
whioh ffie likened to "handles" and other astronomers to "ears."
The Cosmos holds many wonders, but a planet with jug ears was ■',$•
perplexing. Galileo went to his -death with this bizarre matter
unresolved.
As the years passed, observers found the (êars^dwindling
and then reasserting themselves. Eventually, it became clear
that what Galileo had discovered was a thin ring¿) which
/wh
y s
surrounded Saturn at its equator but touched it nowhere. In some
years, because of the changing positions of Earth and Saturn in
their orbits, the ring had been seen edge-on and seemed to
disappear. In other years, it had been viewed more face-on, and
the "ears" grew bigger. But what wao it? A flat, solid plate
with a hole cut out for the planet to fit into? "we now know that
the rings of Saturn are a vast horde of tiny worlds, each on its
separate orbit, each bound to Saturn by the giant planet's
gravity. In size, these worldlets range from particles of fine
dust to houses. They are spaced out in an exquisite set of
concentric rings first revealed in their true majesty by the two
Voyager spacecraft in their 1980/81 flybys. In our century, the
Art Deco rings of Saturn have become emblematic of the future.

In the late 1960s, at a scientific meeting, I was asked to
summarize the outstanding problems in planetary science. One, I
offered, was the question of why, of all the planets in the Solar
System, only Saturn had rings. This, it turns out, is a
nonquestion. No one then knew that all four giant planets in our
Solar System — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — in fact^-"*-""
have rings.
Each ring-system has distinctive features. Jupiter's rings

are tenuous and made mainly of dark particles the size of those
in cigarette smoke. The bright rings of Saturn are composed
mainly of frozen water and could be described as made otf%9 rZ}
snowballs or ice balls; Saturn ha» thousands ofArings, some
twisted, exhibiting strange, dusky, spokelike markings that form
and dissipate. The dark rings of Uranus seem to be composed of
elemental carbon and organic molecules — something like charcoal
or chimney soot; Uranus has nine main rings, a few of which
sometimes seem to "breathe," expanding and contracting.
Neptune's rings are the most tenuous of all, varying so much in
thickness that, when detected from Earth, they appear only as
partial arcs and not complete circles. Each ring-system displays
'As «wn,
an Trtïstere, appropriately unearthly beauty.
U*. 4-» So
How do rings form? One possibility is oonneetad with the-
tides: If an errant world passes close to a planet, its near
side is gravitationally pulled toward the planet more than its
tied to the deep interior, so we know how fast the interior

rotates.
This is a blue, dimly lit, chilly, stormy, and remote world
— but, despite all that, Neptune, it turns out, has much to
teach us about our own planet.
Surrounding Neptune (like the other three gas giants) is a
system of rings, each composed of innumerable orbiting objects
ranging in size from the fine particles in cigarette smoke to
small trucks. Like the rings of other planets in the Solar
System, those of Neptune appear to be evanescentftôyfaucal ¿*CA.I*5<
prnrfQrvec^would disrupt them in less than the age of the Solar

System. This suggests that rings were made more or less
"recently" and are not relics from primordial times. But how can
rings be made?
There aie dlbu ninny muons surrounding the giant pii
/every nuw and then, by Clldiiiu, une cf the multitude of eomat-e
that oWBfcip thiougn me outer Solar system umbL tullida wiUt.a
loon^/The resulting debris — ejected from the moon but
i6t so fast-moving as to escape from the planet's gravity — may
form, for a time, a new ring. <sn we examine Lhe~~small moons

o Solar"^yfetGTTif wr^-^t-mí^H^K -. niimhnr r,f thorn haj^g -c
alg£&fc_bJjg_-&nough for Lhe Impact re to have fractured

ríKffti ^0*e9
and splj impacts*must have
whol^yC^íeme^rislTfea^moonste—-tÈTe fragiucuits uf disintegration
perhaps, for a Lime, fUiml
far side; if it comes close enough, it can literally be torn to
pieces. Another possibility, emerging from the Voyager
reconnaissance of the outer Solar System, is this: Rings are
made when worlds collide and noons are smashed to smithereens.

Both possibilities must have played a rolj
The space between the planets is tri
collection of rogue worldlets, each of them in orbit about

Sun. A few are as big as a county or even a state; many more
have surface areas like those of a village or town. There are

more little ones than big ones, and they range in size down to
particles of dust. Some of them travel on long, stretched-out
elliptical paths, which make them cross the orbit of one or more
planets. - T» tf 9 ' MA /VUfr. *^
=ef±í=r-
Occasionally) there'ie a móon in the way. ¿The collision can
shatter and pulverize both the interloper and the region of the
moon that's hit. ' The roaulLlnij UubiiLr is made of whatever the
colliding bodies were made of, but usually more of the "target"
moon than the impacting interloper. If the colliding worlds are
icy, the net result will be rings of ice particles; if they are
made of organic molecules, the result will be rings of organic
particles (which will slowly be processed by radiation into
carbon). All the mass in the rings of Saturn could have resulted
from the pulverization of one icy moon. The disintegration of
smaller moons can account for the ring-systems of the three other
giant planets.
[••An American Ship. Voyager at Uranus and Neptune" (2A)1 11
; . /su-*-*^*^*^
The American planetary oaiontist. Eugene Shoemaker, of the
U.S. Geological Survey, proposes that many moons in the outer
Solar System have been annihilated and reformed more than once in
the 4.5 billion years since the Sun and the planets condensed out
of the interstellar gas and dust. The picture that is emerging
from the Voyager sweep through the outer Solar System is of
worlds whose placid and lonely vigils are spasmodically
interrupted by catastrophes from space — and of worlds reforming
rec«ní«í.|'-/w.iíi'»»j "4-K» **s elves
from rings and other debris, .rising like phoenixes from their own
The biggest moon in the Neptune system is called Triton. It

has an atmosphere, somewhat similar to Titan's; but, because the
atmosphere and haze are much thinner, we can see Triton's
surface. We find a wondrously variegated landscape. This is a
world of ice ~ methane ice, nitrogen ice, probably underlain by
more familiar water ice and rocks. There are impact basins,
which seem to have been flooded by the liquefied ice before
refreezing; impact craters; long crisscrossing valleys; vast
fields of freshly fallen snow; puckered terrain that resembles
the skin of a cantaloupe; and more or less parallel, long, dark
streaks that seem to have been blown by the wind, despite the
*+k«* "/- \\'cl<r\tfs *"^ "\-\*
thinness of Triton's atmosphere (about 1/10,000th -thinnnr thnn
tt 4- »**f fk-et*
Earth's). I
A
In some places the snow is as bright and white as freshly

fallen Antarctic snows (and may offer a skiing experience
'/' b
[4- -3-93 .atp]
An insert into "l When . Worlds Collide":

A : few page s earl. 1er [than p. , 12] we refer tc » Eugene i
Shoemaker. Let 1 s put in "of the U.S. Geological Survey. N

Unless it is very close to its planet, a shattered moon (or

at least a fair fraction of it) gradually reaccumulates. The
pieces, roughly still in the same orbit about the planet, fall
together helter-skelter -- what used to be a piece of the inside
is now on the outside, and vice versa. The resulting surfaces
might look very odd. Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus, shows
disconcert] umbled surface features and may have had such an
Lgin. / 4.n tact,—indi vitrai «rsaj:
orig ono may have been destroyed
andTeconstltutea several times gaily in thp A,5 billiion-yoar—
history of the Guiar System — phoenixes irepcaLedly flBlhg frum
their own ashes,—recycled "VoTldS".
On the other hand, a moon that's very close to a planet and
gets pulverized cannot reform —- the gravitational tides of the
nearby planet prevent it. The resulting debris, once formed and
spread out into a ring-system, might be very long-lived.
These ideas ^-dorivod from Voyager data and championed mainly-
by Eugene Ohociuakei uf the U.S. Geulogieal Survey,—ate- supported
by the appearance of a number of satellites in the Solar System.
Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, has a large crater named
stickney; Mimas, an inner moon of Saturn, has a big crater named
Herschel. These craters — like those on our own Moon and,
indeed, as seen on worlds throughout the Solar System — are
produced by collisions. An interloper smashes into a bigger
world and makes an immense explosion at the point of impact. A
bowl-shaped crater is excavated, and the smaller impacting object
is destroyed. If the interlopers that dug out the Stickney and

Herschel craters were only a little larger, they would have had
enough energy to blow Phobos and Mimas to pieces. These moons
barely escaped the cosmic wrecking ball.
Every time a world is smashed into, there's one less
interloper in the Solar System. The very fact that many such
collisions have occurred means that rogue worldlets have been
largely used up. Those that are on circular trajectories around
the Sun, those that don't intersect the orbits of any other
worlds, will be unlikely to smash into a planet. Those on
elliptical trajectories, those that cross the orbits of other
planets, will sooner or later collide or be gravitationally
ejected from the Solar System. The planets almost certainly
accumulated from worldlets which in turn had condensed out of a
great flat cloud of gas and dust surrounding the Sun -- the sort
of cloud that can now be seen around nearby younger stars. So,
in the early history of the Solar System before collisions
cleaned things up, there should have been many more worldlets
than we see today.
Indeed, there is clear evidence for this in our own
backyard: If we count up the interloper worldlets in our
neighborhood in space, we can estimate how often they'll hit the
Moon. If we assume there has always been a similar population of
interlopers, we can calculate how many craters there should be on
the Moon. The number we figure is much less than the number we
see on the Moon's ravaged highlands,-so»the unexpected profusion

of craters on the Moon speaks to us of an earlier epoch when the
Solar System was in wild turmoil, churning with worlds on
collision trajectories. Four billion years ago, the lunar
impacts seem to have been hundreds of times more frequent than
they are today; and 4.5 billion years ago, when the planets were
aggregating and forming, collisions happened perhaps a billion
times more often than in our comparatively placid era.
What about the Earth? Why isn't it pockmarked and
disfigured like the nearby Moon? Our world must have been
pummeled from space like all those others. There are few impact
craters left on Earth today, because of efficient erosion by air
and water and the great internal engine that moves continents and
crinkles up mountain ranges. The most satisfactory explanation
of the origin of our own Moon, using knowledge of its chemistry
derived from the Apollo missions, is that it was formed more than
4 billion years ago, when a world the size of Mars struck the
Earth and spewed out debris, most of which then gradually
reaccumulated — atom by atom, boulder by boulder. Much of the
Earth's rocky mantle was reduced to dust and hot gas and blasted
into space. If that unknown impacting world had been only a
little larger, the result would have been the fragmentation of
the Earth. Perhaps there once were other worlds in our Solar
System — good citizens, minding their own business — hit by
some demon worldlet and utterly demolished, and of which today we
f/'£
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert R into "When Worlds Collide," p. 8:

The first main-belt asteroid, Gaspare, was photographed by the
Galileo spacecraft in 1991 on its tortuous journey to Jupiter.
It seems misshapen because its gravity is too low to collapse the
odd projection into a sphere. We may be seeing here a world
fragmented by past collisions, pieces broken off. Indeed, there
are those who think that Gaspara is a double asteroid, two pieces
of identical. . . [End of audiotape dated 4/3/93; sentence not
continued on fractional successor tape dated 4/5.]
1991, #6: "When Worlds Collide"] 8
have not even an intimation.

Four billion years ago, our Solar System vas a violent and
dangerous place in which the chaos may have been relieved by much
more flamboyant ring-systems than grace the planets today. If
they had moons, the Earth, Mars, and the other small planets may
then have been adorned by their own ring-systems.
Today, some of the dwindling supply of worldlets are called
asteroids; some, comets; others, small moons. But these are
arbitrary categories — real worldlets may breach these human-
made partitions. Some asteroids are rocky, others metallic,
still others rich in organic matter. None is bigger than 1,000
kilometers across. They are found mainly in a belt between the
orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers used to think these
"main-belt" asteroids were the remains of a demolished world, but
another idea is now more fashionable: The Solar System may once
have been filled with asteroids, many of vhich went into building
the planets. Only in the asteroid belt near Jupiter did the
gravity of this most massive planet prevent the nearby worldlets
from coalescing into a new world. Perhaps the asteroids, instead
of representing a world that once was and is no more, are the
pieces of a world destined never to form.
Going down to about kilometer size, there may be several
million asteroids, but that's still far too few, in the enormous
volume of interplanetary space, to cause any serious—hazard to
spacecraft on their way to the outer Solar System./ No umt lids-
Main-belt asteroids mostly stay at home. To investigate

them, we must go and visit them. Comets, on the other hand,
sometimes come and visit us, as Halley's comet did in 1910 and
1986. Comets are made mainly of ice, plus smaller amounts of
rocky and organic material. When heated, the ice vaporizes,
forming the long and lovely tails blown outward by the solar wind
and the pressure of sunlight. After many passages by the Sun,
the ice is all evaporated, sometimes leaving a dead, rockytfand
organic world. But sometimes the remaining particles spread out
in the comet's former orbit, generating a debris trail around the
Sun.
Some disintegrating comets have orbits that cross the Earth.
Every time a bit of cometary fluff the size of a grain of sand
enters the Earth's atmosphere at high speed, it burns up,
producing a momentary trail of light that Earthbound observers
call a meteor or "shooting star." But its beauty should not
deceive us: There is a continuum that connects these shimmering
visitors to our night skies with the destruction of worlds.
A few asteroids now and then give off little puffs of gas or
even form a temporary tail, suggesting that they are in
transition between comethood and asteroiddom. There are small
i
moons going around the planets that are probably captured

asteroids or comets; the moons of Mars and the outer satellites
of Jupiter may be in this category. Such bodies aren't
spherical, because they are too small; only in large bodies is
the gravity enough to make mountains and other projections
collapse of their own weight, rounding the world. Gravity
smooths down everything that sticks out too far. And, indeed,
when we infer their shapes by spacecraft imaging or by ground-
based nonphotographic techniques, almost always we find lumpy,
irregular, potato-shaped worldlets.
There are about 150 known asteroids whose paths take them
near the Earth. They are called, appropriately enough, "near-
Earth" asteroids. Almost all of them are only a few kilometers
across or smaller and take one to a few years to make one circuit
around the Sun. About 10 percent of them, sooner or later, are
bound to hit the Earth — with devastating consequences. But in
astronomy, "sooner or later" encompasses billions of years. A
10-kilometer asteroid or comet hit the Earth 65 million years ago
and seems to have been responsible for the extinction of the
i-» » « ¿ '■>
perhaps /
dinosaurs and most other species of life then on Earth,if f*
an
by climatic change.akin to nuclear winter. Every hundred million.
Ï
vann nr no, t.Yl* T-prtJa. rorif>ivp.n nueh a catastrophic impact! ove TV
hundred thousand Mcatb u¿ HO, our planer ib UiL by a body_
¿£han- 1 kilometer across; and every century or so, there's a much—
-mnllrr rnllini/n —Ti" ffl"Tg~F'-'"Qrt'1il rna
" Ml
" u> 1nr, n
r ^ " "f *
I n
n»AH
'J~
'/'■
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert T into "When Worlds Collide," p. 11:

Many near-Earth asteroids, like many main-belt asteroids, are
rocky objects. A few are mainly metal, and it has been suggested
that enormous financial returns might be implied if we could move
such an asteroid into orbit around the Earth and then
systematically mine it. Some are rich in organic matter,
apparently preserving for us material from the earliest history
of the Solar System — of the sort which fell on the primitive
Earth and contributed to the origin of life. Two near-Earth
asteroids (see figures) have been found by [Steven? Stephen]
Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to be double. Perhaps a
larger world has broken in two as it passed through the strong
gravitational tides of a planet like Jupiter, but more
interesting is the possibility that two worlds on similar orbits
made a gentle collision and stuck, a process which may have been
key to the building of planets and the Earth. The near-Earth
asteroids have much to teach us.
1991, #6:. "When Worlds Collide"] 11
idi-ge nuulëdi Uüapum It might be a good idea for us to know a

little niûEe about near-Earth asteroids.
sometimes, we hear about an asteroid making a "near miss" of
the Earth. (Why do we call it a "near miss"? A "near hit" is
what we really mean.) But then we read a little more carefully,
and it turns out that its closest approach to the Earth was some
hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers. That doesn't
count — that's too far away, farther even than the Noon. But if
we had an inventory of all the near-Earth asteroids, including
those considerably smaller than a kilometer across, we could
project their orbits into the future and predict which ones are
potentially dangerous. There are an estimated 6,000 of them
bigger than half a kilometer across, of which we have actually
observed only a few percent.
IL may nut be beyond um abiliby to^brihg a large rocket
motor to the surface of an errant asteroid and alter its
trajectory just/enough so it misses the Earth. Thisyis a much
better idea than the alternative ~ blowing an asteroid to
smithereens with a 20-megaxon nuclear weapon ana hoping that each
smithereen burns up while entering the Earth''s atmosphere. But
net- fir-c-h VnnT.x T.TTUIIM I !■■ , ™\^ j s^flnri wh°rf It's httrHfvL
In fact, we're net duiny a very good Job in luuking lui Lhem.
<=fí
One of the two most successful search programs for near-Earth
asteroids has been under way for nearly two decades at Palomar
Observatory, under the direction of Eleanor "Glo" Helin of NASA's
I / >é>
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert S into "When Worlds Collide," p. 12:

Recently the third search program has been organized at the
University of Arizona, where David Rabinowitz [check spelling]
has begun to find many more small objects near the Earth —
smaller than about 100 meters across — than almost anyone had
suspected.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory; partial support for her research has

been contributed by members of the Planetary Society,-a private-
.gggattiadLlOfl In Pasadena, Califumia. tfrhe other program has
been carried out by Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker.! *A much more
comprehensive search should be mustered, building on the work of
these pioneers.
The near-Earth asteroids have evocative mythological names:
Orpheus, Hathor, Icarus, Adonis, Apollo, Cerberus, Khufu, Amor,
Tantalus.Aten. Midas. Ra-Shalom, Phaethon, Quetzalcoatl. But
there's one ot special interest^ that dooon't yeL have a name.
T^lt used to be called 1982DÜ and now has Lhu iiiuueiiiual-
■designation -ttttr.—Helln, its discoverer, is in the process of
choooing-a name, with help from PlaneLaiy Society, members..) In
general, it's much easier to get onto and off of near-Earth
asteroids than the Moon. Asteroid 4G60 is one of the easiest to
land on and return home from.
U~'<
Some humans (all Soviets') have already been in space for
periods longer than the entire round-trip time to AJluiuid «ooO.
The rocket technology to get there already exists. It's a much
smaller step than going to Mars or even than returning to the
Moon. It's real exploration of a truly new world, rather than
the monotonous orbiting of the Earth at low altitude that is
sometimes passed off as space "exploration." And it might not be
ri<Mg*'»-4TttT—fcbeir orbits, isbotrid Lhtk hour Of nubul e^cr arrive

/','&
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert U into "When Worlds Collide," p. 13:

[ * * *; then:]
The new field of near-Earth asteroids seems forward-looking,
constructive, potentially providing deep insights into the
origins of our world and ourselves, and possibly of enormous
commercial value. And if such objects routinely collide with the
Earth and if there's some chance — even a very small chance —
of a catastrophic collision, our own survival might depend on
understanding these objects. It is a natural thought that it
might not be too soon to start practicing getting to these
worldlets and diverting their orbits, should the hour of need
ever arise. Certainly we should be mounting a comprehensive
search and characterization of all of them able to do our species
harm.
But this aspect of the subject has begun to worry me. I'm
concerned that there is a booby-trap in this subject, that we
must be very slow and very cautious, and even that there are some
technologies that it may be better not to develop. Let me
explain:
[New paragraph.]
er v»4 ny rV *
One possible future -space mission loavoo Earth <on Chrictmac
EveoT the ytiar ¿UUUv takes 10 months to get teu Lhlb asteroid,
spends 30 days there, and then requires only three weeks to
return^-ari-iviny- hume on Chrii.Uïâs Eve uf ae»l. Ther many
other possible mission design*? snme—lass—demanding on Llm tucket
technology. We could .do it (earlier and easier) with robots, or
— if we're up to it — with humans. We could examine this
little world's shape, constitution, interior, past history,
organic chemistry, cosmic evolution, and possible tie to comets.
We could bring samples back for examination at leisure in
Earthbound laboratories. We could investigate whether fehere are
commercially valuable resources -- metals or minerals — on the
asteroid^'. If we are ever going to send humans to Mars, near-
Earth asteroids provide a convenient and appropriate intermediate
goal — to test out the equipment and exploratory protocols while
studying an almost wholly unknown little world. Here's a way to
t^R**» \^-»'r"» r«*^y *"*
get our feet wet again as__M» re-enter the vast cosmic ocean.
S^~~~^ o
b
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert U into "Between Enemies" (which is just a

continuation of "When Worlds Collide"), p. It
START II is agreed to in principle, although not yet ratified.
[1/1/93 Sita:] 1992, #32: Between Enemies, Bulletin of the

1, May 1992^*4-26. Excerpted in "The World
Must Take a Tough Stance ptí Limiting Nuclear Arms," by Frank
Rutter, Vancouver fBCf Sun. May 9, 1992; in "No More Doomsday:
Good Ideas Aboufe^the Future of Nuclear Weapons," Syracuse Post-
Standard . >May 18, 1992; and in other newspapers.
Our long nuclear nightmare has ended. Or at least, that's

the prevailing view. Launchers are being destroyed, idoMIRVing
teas been announced, testing is down, the Soviet Union is no more,
and leading ex-Soviet wedpuns scientists are,—it is aaidj boing
-olfeied Jubs by the UuiLed Otatoc. The Looking Glass command-
and-control aircraft have been mothballed, and the Russians, they
say, are taking United States cities off their targeting lists.
(The United States has offered no comparable reassurance.)
President George Bush proposes reducing the U.S. arsenal below
5,000 warheads and President Boris Yeltsin sees him and raises
him — or rather, lowers him, suggesting half that number.*-Afe-
-JrftasL db far as talk gocoy. p#e are witnessing an arms race in
reverse.?
In light of all this, '"the dangers of global thermonuclear
war are, in almost everyone's estimation, much reduced. -But—.
-Aheie am bLill--eveg 50,000 nuclear warheadG in tho world-^r^.
maybe-ovei" bU,UUU. Under tne intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty^—boosters ~Have~~been retired or destroyed, while-warheads
[(1/1/93 Vitat) 1992, #32: "Between Enemies"] 2
have boon recycled-o~f~ stored, perhaps for a rainy day. To the

h&s±r of wy knowledge, nnt- a single warhead has yet boon destroyed
or permanently inoapae Dun'b break out the champagne yefc.-

The U.S. defense budget, still nearly $300 billion a year,
is the most obvious source of funding for the urgent domestic
problems that have been allowed to fester over four decades of
the Cold War. {The U.S. Lab lor Lhe Culd Wai is about $10"
trjJJ-ion——enough to buy everything in the united States except
for the land.}- Almost all Americans would agree that some U.S.
military force, still formidable by world standards, should be
preserved for national security. But — in light of such
problems as declining productivity, toxic waste, homelessness,
inadequate health care, the collapsing infrastructure, AIDS,
ozone layer depletion, and global warming — unless we change our
way of doing things, there may not be much left that's worth
defending.
All bureaucracies attempt to maintain themselves when their
primary mission fades. They invent new tasks, preferably urgent
ones, and the resulting inertia becomes especially high when jobs
and profits are at risk. The Defense Department, with its
laboratories and contractors, tends to inflate possible future
perils. The statues of Lenin have not yet been melted down, and
already we hear that there may be grave dangers from breakaway
ex-Soviet republics, or from fundamentalist Muslims, or China, or
— under certain circumstances -- from Israel. The Japanese are
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert A into "Between Enemies," p. 3:

Since there are many fewer large asteroids than small ones,
run-of-the-mill collisions with the Earth will be by small
obj ects,
is 100 times the explosive yield of all the nuclear weapons on
the planet, simultaneously exploded. The destructive energy
latent in a large near-Earth asteroid dwarfs anything the human
species can get its hands on.
I )
[(1/1/93 VitaM 1992, #32: "Between Enemies"]
increasingly depicted as a menace. How realistic are these

fears, and how large a defense establishment is needed to offset
them? And how much of these alleged dangers is a frantic search
for some replacement, even if short-term, for our former Cold War
adversary?
A credible, sufficiently dangerous enemy is a great
convenience for politicians unable to deal with proliferating
domestic problems and potential discord. And if such an enemy
doesn't exist, it's usually easy enough to arrange for one.
Many methods are being proposed to maintain the weapons
establishment ~ maybe weaponeers can teach school, or make
trains, or interdict drugs while preserving their military aegis.
One particularly instructive search for a new enemy can be found
in the weapons laboratories' and the Defense Department's
Strategic Defense Initiative Organization's recent interest in
lotgccuda-jind -e
rhe inner Solar/System is filled with small worlds/, some
/ /^
which intercept the/Earth's/drbit.
i / 7
It As easy/to show thai
sooner/W later one of^tnese objects will Kit the E< as Has
happened — with catastrophic consequences — in the past, jftie
longer the wait, the more devastating the impact. On average,
once a millennium there will be an impact event equivalent to the
largest nuclear weapons explosion; every 10,000 years, one that
might have global climatic effects; and every million years, an
impact event equivalent to a million megatons of TNT that would
I i
/ 6
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert c' into "Between Enemies," p. 3:

Some 50,000 people die every year in the United States alone from
highway accidents, and hundreds of thousands from the effects of
alcohol and tobacco. Amortized over the waiting time, asteroidal
collision does not seem very worrisome.
[(1/1/93 ïifca:) 1992, #32: "Between Enemies"]
work a glohaX catastrophe, killing a significant fraction of the

human species. ^ In 100 million years, you can bet on something
like the Cretaceous-Tertiary event that seems to have
extinguished all the dinosaurs and most of the other species of
life on Earth* perhaps by all "impact wliiLei" analogous to
mi"1 rrrr~"Trfn1-rr> bnt -ifill mnrr "ir'nrn—
However, in this grisly actuarial calculus the equivalent
number of annual deaths worldwide is at most in the thousands.
With effects amortized, it might be argued that this is far from
our most pressing problem.J if a big impact happens, though, it
would be an unprecedented human disaster.
Along parallel and only weakly interacting tracks, the
planetary science community and the military, aware of the
foregoing scenarios, have been pursuing these questions: how to
monitor all sizable near-Earth interplanetary objects, how to
characterize their physical and chemical nature, how to predict
which ones may be on a future collision trajectory with Earth,
and filially, how to prevent a collision from happening. In the
early 1980s, some in the^weapons establishment argued that the
Soviets might use near-Earth asteroids as first-strike weapons;
the alleged plan was called "Ivan's Hammer." Countermeasures
were needed. But maybe it wasn't a bad idea for the U.S. to
develop something similar.
There are two methods of prevention currently being
discussed. First, a nuclear weapon of unproouJunted yield might
[(1/1/93 Vita;) 1992, #32: "Between Enemies"]
blast the asteroid or comet into fragments that would

disintegrate and atomize on entering the Earth's atmosphere.
This method might require nuclear weapons of 100,000 megatons or
more (the highest-yield nuclear weapon ever exploded Is about 60
megatons).
Since there is no theoretical upper limit to the yield of a
thermonuclear weapon, there are those in the weapons laboratories
who consider such impact prevention as not only a stirring
challenge but also as a way to unite continuing nuclear weapons
development with a permanent seat on the save-the-Earth
bandwagon. nO0r*t .5"e Ti # i»í
Another approach under discussion is less dramatic but still

useful as a way of maintaining the weapons establishment — a
plan to place comparatively low-yield nuclear weapons on or near v
C ¿v**» •*»//w *4- {4-s c/ •»■**-/■ V-» <!».•* S"*,nj
an errant object and explode them naar perihelion, to deflect -%he
,¥>
object's trajectory away from the Earth. This procedure also
offers a way to deal with a suddenly detected long-period comet
on imminent collision trajectory with the Earth. The comet would
be intercepted with a small asteroid in a game of celestial
billiards.
;¿ s-» tml *f-o >*!♦.
The ofriry- problem is that if you can deflect an object away
from collioion with the Earth, you can also deflect an object not
on collision trajectory so it does collide with the Earth. Both
cases — disintegration -and deflection^— require developing
technologies of mass destruction many orders of magnitude more
1/I&
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert D* into "Between Enemies," p. 6:

It's no use saying that all technologies can be used for good or
for ill. That is certainly true, but when the "ill" becomes
sufficiently apocalyptic, we may have to set limits on which
technologies may be developed. (In a way we do this all the
time, because we can't afford to develop all technologies. Some
are favored and some are not.)
h
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert E* into "Between Enemies," [p. ]:

If such a technology were developed, can any international
safeguards be imagined that have a reliability commensurate with
the risk?
/ &
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert F into "Between Enemies," p. 6:

The openness of scientific discovery and the closed nature of the
nuclear weapons establishment are fundamentally incompatible.
[(1/1/93 Vita:) 1992, #32: "Between Enemies"]
dangerous than those that now exist.

Can ve humans be trusted with world-destroying technologies?
If we must wait a million years for a significant fraction of the
human population to be killed by an impact, isn't it more likely
that in much less time this technology will get into the hands of
a Hitler or a Stalin, some misanthropic sociopath, someone in the
grip of unusually severe testosterone poisoning, or technicians
incompetent ciently vigilant in handling the controls
l«7 *«Tho risks oeem far gieatm fchun the potential
and safeguards
benefits. •
Tracking asteroids and comets is prudent, it's good science,

and it doesn't cost much. But# knowing our weaknesses, why would
we even consider developing a technology today to disintegrate or
deflect small worlds? Job security in tha military
establishment? An emotional need to justify nuclear weapons by
those with guilty consciences? Shall we imagine the technology
in the hands of many nations_^_âich__providing checks and balances
against misuse by another? \3^*~«»r^LE—'
This impact prevention-enterprise also poisons the waters
for space exploration. Tho recent appuiiiLiueiiL of a furmer
Strategic Defense InifciaLlvu -c*:c}ar\\*n+\rs* (enm) „ffjrÍF|1 ^ hrrirl
fehe-WASA-^ífíee-in-chorqe of humaa-mi^sinng *n +^» rinnctg ma^_be
fehe-meresfe-of—eoincidenceb, but it íJ net rcaaaugiag» *fe*fche*-is__
*h±s January^ canocllafeion of NASA's pioneering Comet Rendezvous
and Asteroid Flyby mission,-- the same month that a classified
¡U»6
[4-3-93.atp]
Insert G* into "Between Enemies," [p. ]:

Meanwhile, near-Earth asteroids, and means for altering their
orbits, are gathering a great deal of attention. There is some
sign that officials in the Department of Defense and the weapons
laboratories are beginning to understand that there may be real
dangers in planning to.push asteroids around. Civilian and
military scientists have met to discuss the subject. Many people
also, on first hearing about the asteroid danger, think of it as
a kind of Chicken Little fable; Goosey-Lucy [?], newly arrived,
is communicating the urgent news that the sky is falling. The
tendency to instantly dismiss the prospect of any catastrophe
which we have not personally witnessed is in the long run
potentially very dangerous. But in this case it is an ally of
prudence.
I like to think that our history among the near-Earth
asteroids will be something like this: From the Earth we
discover them, plot and monitor their orbits, and measure their
sizes, rotation rates, and composition. We send robotic
spacecraft to fly by a few selected objects, to orbit then, to
land on them, and eventually to return surface samples to
laboratories on Earth. Eventually we send humans there (who
will, incidentally, have a rollicking good time: you can make a
standing broad jump of ten kilometers or more into the sky, and
lob a baseball into orbit around the asteroid). Fully aware of
[4-3-93.atp]
the dangers, we make no attempts to alter the trajetories of

these worldlets until the potential for misuse of world-altering
technologies becomes much less than it is today. That might take
a very long time. Eventually, cautiously, scrupulously careful
to attempt nothing on asteroids that could cause a major
catastrophe on Earth, we begin to learn how to move the small
worlds around. Eventually we learn to insert small asteroids
filled with precious and industrial metals into Earth orbit.
Gradually we develop the technology to deflect a large asteroid
or comet that might in the foreseeable future hit the Earth,
while as carefully building safeguards against misuse. The
statistics indicate that we can wait a very long time — decades
certainly, probably centuries to millennia — with no urgent need
for such technology. If we play our cards right, we can pace
what we can do up there to what we are doing down here. The two
of course are deeply connected.
[(1/1/93 Vita;) 1992, #32: "Between Enemies"]
SDIO mission to an asteroid was announced/.y^his mission may al^p

i^L A» * h*-* 1 *o/
rcun
serve as a way to circumvent the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty's
restrictions on testing Star Wars hardware.)
Doubtless other dangers will be discovered or concocted that
have the effect of preventing too steep a reduction in the
military-weapons establishment. In the ancient scientific
tradition, such claims ought to be looked at with the keenest
skepticism.
The end of the Cold War permits the reconstruction of our
global civilization away from weapons of mass destruction, away
from massive conventional firepower, and toward solutions for
such urgent problems as poverty, overpopulation, the
deteriorating global environment, education, and social justice
We Americans find ourselves unexpectedly between enemies. This
is an opportunity that has not come often in this century. It
arrives not a moment too soon.
&~y
<^
*«-x

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Víá'x> K6*l, 47c% i : Z

A PALE BLUE DOT

Copyright °1993 by Carl Sagan

Assume approx. 15 pp. MS/chapter = approx. 10-12 pp.

Explorers H- Coldon/Cagan dialogue,—lay I paragiaphi—

"1 í»c Se* re I

Let's call the Introduction "Wanderers," and here is an

climate changes, there will be vast numbers of environmental

My grandfather was a beast of burdenj) and I have been to.

-is closely similar tu Llie EaiLh.—We—have—f-eu»d__

"Since the advent of successful interplanetary flight in

lofty skyscrapers and endless hubbub of his new land. We know

By profession, I'm a planetary astronomer. My job is to

Every one of these worlds is lovely and instructive. But, so far

indeed to whom they were closely related.

agriculture, contraception, advances in transportation and

because we can think. We are privileged to influence and perhaps

different trajectory, within the ecliptic plane, and so she was

large globe. While almost everyone understands that the Earth is

further awakening ourselves to our true circumstances. Many in

of the motion of the spacecraft; these planets are so dim that to

certain. Neptune, for instance, is blue, but for a wholly

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.

A Universe Not Made for Us

[Epigraph: from beginning of "Dover Beach."]

It almost never feels like prejudice. Rather, it seems

dishearteningly many cases — that we are not.

This satisfying demonstration of our self-importance,

ftemmaü»» Once most scientists were convinced, informed public

Well, it was then widely held, even if the Earth isn't at

the great classical physicists believed that the velocity of the

In each age the chauvinist predispositions are challenged in

long sequence of failed chauvinisms — I would guess that the

[Rootatc*. ] In this way, although in a more sophisticated form,

thoroughly incompatible with the proposition that the huifiarH ^-«-«.^v***/*

4U SX»y* ^*S A. *+-+*'

No matter what the scientists say, in everyday life we often

An insert into A. Pale Blue Dot:

Insert C for A Pale Blue Dot, [chapter?]; also for the

\T\\ imirlai^-rwj pm ipl g uhn ^ ^ rt TIA*- A/JVfla f VSA'K--KhT3--<a^«-W^nf aTOlin^^,

the-Eagth. In a 1992 speech Pope John Paul II says, "From the

T-Ve ¡Ki,frml,Tll-)i 0*\- ^rHrt IK i-Lm- C#«n~t,„s S$- */_/.-

it's okay to slaughter them. Nonhuman intelligence, both on

Most of these debates were entered into with no thought for

An-inseit into A Paie Blue-Dot:

You're an alien explorer entering the Solar System after a

long journey through the blackness of interstellar space. You

oceans of liquid water exist on none of the other worlds.

methane. In fact, you find one out of every million molecules is

obvious signs of life. You observe a dense atmosphere in motion.

straight lines that connect the cities seem to be filled with

Some of the lights, though, are not due to cities. In North

roadways. But carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. As you watch,

uncontrolled experiments on their planet's climate. Haven't they

Spacecraft from the Earth have now flown by dozens of

(twice) to be accelerated by the gravities of these planets;

It's still dark out. You're lying in bed, fully awake —

Finally, these cheerless gray emissaries usher you out of the

slither through vails — are able to clone cells. The

4U SX»y* ^S A. +-+*'

T-Ve ¡Ki,frml,Tll-)i 0\- ^rHrt IK i-Lm- C#«n~t,„s S$- /_/.-