Free Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan

photography near full phase. The title of The Whole Earth Catalog derives from its founder’s urge to see a photograph of our planet as a whole. The Fall 1970 issue expanded this perspective, showing a photograph of the whole Milky Way Galaxy.
    There is a similar trend apparent in some modern art and in rock ‘n’ roll music: “Cosmo’s Factory” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Starship” by the Jefferson Airplane, “Mr. Spaceman” and “CTA 102” by the Byrds, “Mr. Rocket Man” by Elton John, and many others.
    Such interest is not restricted to the young. There is a tradition in the United States of public-subscription support of astronomy. Construction of entire observatories and salaries for staff have been paid for voluntarily by the local communities. Several million people visit planetariums in North America and Britain each year.
    The current resurgence of interest in the ecology of the planet Earth is also connected with this longing for a cosmic perspective. Many of the leaders of the ecological movement in the United States were originally stimulated to action by photographs of Earth taken from space, pictures revealing a tiny, delicate, and fragile world, exquisitely sensitive to the depredations of man–a meadow in the middle of the sky.
    As the results of space exploration and their accompanying new perspectives on Earth and its inhabitants permeate our society, they must, I believe, have consequences in literature and poetry, in the visual arts and music. The distinguished American physicist Richard Feynman writes: “It does no harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?” 1
    1 Richard Feynman, Introduction to Physics , Vol. I, Addison Wesley, pp. 3-6.
    But mere general exploration does not yet motivate pervasive public interest in space. For many, the rocks returned from the Moon were a great disappointment. They were seen as merely rocks. What role they might play in chronicling the days of creation of the Earth-Moon system has not yet been explained adequately to the public.
    Where public interest in space is most apparent is in cosmology and in the search for extraterrestrial life, topics that strike resonant chords in a significant fraction of mankind. The fact that much more newspaper space is given to the most casual hypothesis on exobiology than to many of the most careful and important results in other areas is an accurate reflection of where public interest lies. The discovery of interstellar microwave lines of formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide has been widely described in the public press as connected, through a long set of linkages, to questions in biology.
    While it is true that the average person thinks in terms of mild variants of human beings when he is asked to imagine extraterrestrial life, it is also true that interest even in Martian microbes is much larger than in many other areas of space exploration. The search for extraterrestrial life could be a keystone of public support for space experiments–experiments oriented both within and beyond the Solar System.
    There are many possible viewpoints on the present and near-future costs of space science and astronomy. Because the annual costs of ground-based astronomy are only a few percent of the costs of the scientific space program, I will concentrate on the price of the latter. It is customary to compare expenditures on space to annual expenditures in the United States for ethyl alcohol or bubble gum or cosmetics. I personally find it more useful to compare the costs with those of the U. S. Department of Defense. Using a report of the government’s General Accounting Office (the New York Times , July 19, 1970), we learn that the total anticipated cost of