It’s true – he’s no Richard Heene Psyience Detective, but Sagan was pretty cool for his time.
Speaking of the odds that there’s life on other planets, if Sagan is right, and if there are potentially thousands, or even millions of planets out there with intelligent life, I wonder what the odds are that some of them have equivalents to our Richard Heene and Octomom.
9 Comments
Thank you for the excellent example of how hope makes otherwise smart people ass back stupid. “If you flip a coin and it comes up heads here on earth and you flip that coin over and over for billions of years and it comes up heads everywhere, everytime … imagine … the mathematical possibilities (if the mathematical odds are ignored) … the possibilities are positively … magical.”
Wow Carl Sagan. That series of “ifs” blew my mind! It was as if each spurious, unlikely event added to potential virility to the next! (No way! You got heads four times in a row! That must mean you can get it eight…that must mean you can get it sixteen…)
Every layer makes the likelihood less probable and so more magnificent and hence probable (for what is probable besides the magnificent)! I almost avoid imagining that you are just another lonely, flesh and blood person on an accidental planet trying to create some lasting meaning out of world ultimately full of well intentioned shit… Instead, you are a massive brain of imagined possibility! You are ever stretching calculations of the chance that we are not alone…
See also the pale blue dot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M
Hey C7, can you re-write your rant in English so the rest of us can understand it? I must be one of those hopeful, yet ass back stupid people.
Is “unintelligible” the new “clever”?
I want my ass back.
You cannot unring a bell, Robert.
didn’t e.e.cummings write —
‘look there’s a hell of a planet next door! let’s go’
?
If only we could.
http://2012changesarenow.blogspot.com/2008/07/aliens-on-moon.html
Martian Moon Base
good album title
Mark, I think “I want my ass back” would make for a great slogan for Democrats who feel their party has left them.
As for ‘unringing bells’ you know all I need to do is sew myself up, hold a couple purity balls and, voilà, I’m back in business.