Sagan
There is a bed in Seattle which is nestled in North America on the spinning Earth led by the Sun around the Milky Way, a speck of cosmic dust floating in the Universe. On this bed Carl Sagan died of an obscure disease for which there is no cure. Carl Sagan is a celebrated writer and astronomer, but most remembered for his writings. Like Galileo he brought the beauty of science to the people. He is the writer of 'Cosmos', an award winning television mini-series that brought the wonders of astronomy into the home. His last and final work was a collection of his essays; Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death on the Brink of the Millennium. . Sagan wrote with a sense of awe, humility and reverence of nature. This book is an expression of Sagan's passions for the things around. The book is so varied in topic that it is difficult at times to find a unifying factor. Nor does the book reach any sort of conclusion as to the direction of man and things around him. In this we can understand the true sadness of Sagan's death, he was a child who was overwhelmed by the beauty of the universe around him and had not the time needed to express all of it in words.
This is where people like Carl Sagan fit in. The power of his writing is its ability to teach the average man of the wonders around him in and easy to understand, non-confrontational manner. From this education we will learn to be critical of science and not shun it. The real progress for both western and eastern man will happen on a personal level and education is its vehicle. We do not judge the progress of a society by measuring the height of their buildings, the strength of their telescopes or grace of their athletes. We measure progress by looking at the individual. In 1994 I spent one month in the country of my ancestors, India. Immediatley I marveled at the advancements in my rural village in the period between a prior visit. Televisions had become widespread, satellites were attached to a quarter of the homes and telephones were now as common as curry. Night fell on my humble village. The nights are pitch black, there are no lamps to illuminate the streets. A problem quickly arises; if you don't know every back alley, every tiny claustrophobic cobble stone street, every pseudo-dead end path (paths that seem to dead ends but if you walk through a Hobbit hole like door, you emerge on to another tiny cobblestone street), you are quickly lost. On top of all of this, the streets are roamed by stray dogs. Attempting to walk across the village, as I did without a flashlight(they attract bandits) is daunting; frightening on the most primitive of levels. To my relief I have learned that since my visit street lamps have been installed in heavily traveled areas. As a western observer I overlooked the technological necessity of my village. By 'my village' I mean then millions of rural villages in the dozens of countries around the world. All the gadgets that these villages will acquire will not make up for the basic security that a simple low pressure sodium street lamp will provide. These small centers will have to be built up from the ground up with their specific needs in mind. Sadly this has been overlooked by the western 'guardians' of civilization, the dozens of failed hydroelectric, infrastructure and aid projects are a testament to that. In our day, that is today, there are more scientists than there ever was in the past. Tomorrow will bring more still. Scientists by nature are disruptive creatures, there favourite pastime is pacing in back and forth in their laboratories creating theories as to how the clockwork of the universe ticks. Others scientists spend their time trying to disprove each others theories. In doing so changing the nature the unive
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1756
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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