Q: You call them The Great Demotions, all of these thoughts which we have so cherished. Well, guess what? The universe doesn't revolve around the Earth. And guess what? The Earth isn't the only world out there. Are we still clinging to any conceits? Such as those which led to the Great Demotions over the past centuries?
Carl Sagan: Well, you would think we should be over it. But we still are battling, at least in the United States, the conceit that humans are separate from the rest of nature. That an unbridgeable gap separates humans from the other plants and animals. That we are the particular beneficiaries of the concern of the creator of the universe, more than any of the 10 million other species of plants and animals on the Earth. When, in fact, all of our vaunted uniqueness turns out to be shared. with other animals, especially with chimpanzees, our closest relatives with whom we share 99.6% of our hereditary material.
Another area in which the demotion is being fought is the idea that there are no other planets beyond those in our own solar system. But in the last 15 years, the most marvelous set of findings has occurred in which it now appears that planets are an ordinary, probably inevitable accompaniment of star formation, and that almost every young star, like the Sun in the early stages of formation, is surrounded by this flat disc of gas and dust over which the planets were formed. And we now have the first bona fide real planetary system around a very unlikely object, a particular pulsar called 1257 plus 12. And the technology is just about to reach out and find whatever planetary systems there are nearby.
[ Note: As of September 2023, there are 5514 confirmed exoplanets in 4107 planetary systems. ]
And a third one is the idea that even if there are an enormous number of planets, only ours has life and intelligence. And there the story is open. We send spacecraft to other planets like Mars to see if there are any simple forms of life. We use radio telescopes to see if messages are being sent to us by civilizations on planets of other stars. So far, although there've been some very curious, tantalizing findings in both of those approaches, we have found nothing definitive, unambiguous evidence for extraterrestrial life. And the debate is still open.
In our ignorance, the geocentrists still find hope.
When their methods are so unreliable, hope is all they have.
