Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 489

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium," by Carl Sagan.

 

 

I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it. 

But Johnny Carson—on whose Tonight Show I’d appeared almost thirty times over the years—said it. He’d dress up in a corduroy jacket, a turtleneck sweater, and something like a mop for a wig. He had created a rough imitation of me, a kind of Doppelgänger, that went around saying “billions and billions” on late-night television. It used to bother me a little to have some simulacrum of my persona wandering off on its own, saying things that friends and colleagues would report to me the next morning. (Despite the disguise, Carson—a serious amateur astronomer—would often make my imitation talk real science.) 

Astonishingly, “billions and billions” stuck. People liked the sound of it. Even today, I’m stopped on the street or on an airplane or at a party and asked, a little shyly, if I wouldn’t—just for them—say “billions and billions.”  

“You know, I didn’t actually say it,” I tell them. 

“It’s okay,” they reply. “Say it anyway.”



Only at visible and immediately adjacent frequencies are any significant differences in skin reflectivity manifest. People of Northern European ancestry and people of Central African ancestry are equally black in the ultraviolet and in the infrared, where nearly all organic molecules, not just melanin, absorb light. 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.



Say you’re designing a bridge or skyscraper. It’s customary to build in, to demand, a tolerance to catastrophic failure far beyond what the likely stresses will be. Why? Because the consequences of the collapse of the bridge or skyscraper are so serious, you must be sure. You need very reliable guarantees. The same approach, I think, must be adopted for local, regional, and global environmental problems. And here, as I’ve said, there is great resistance, in part because large amounts of money are required from government and industry. For this reason, we will increasingly see attempts to discredit global warming. But money is also needed to truss up bridges and to reinforce skyscrapers. This is considered a normal part of the cost of building big. Designers and builders who cut corners and take no such precautions are not considered prudent capitalists because they don’t waste money on implausible contingencies. They are considered criminals. There are laws to make sure bridges and skyscrapers don’t fall down. Shouldn’t we also have laws and moral proscriptions treating the potentially far more serious environmental issues?



For many Americans, communism means poverty, backwardness, the Gulag for speaking one’s mind, a ruthless crushing of the human spirit, and a thirst to conquer the world. For many Soviets, capitalism means heartless and insatiable greed, racism, war, economic instability, and a worldwide conspiracy of the rich against the poor. These are caricatures—but not wholly so—and over the years Soviet and American actions have given them some credence and plausibility. 

These caricatures persist because they are partly true, but also because they are useful. If there is an implacable enemy, then bureaucrats have a ready excuse for why prices go up, why consumer goods are unavailable, why the nation is noncompetitive in world markets, why there are large numbers of unemployed and homeless people, or why criticism of leaders is unpatriotic and impermissible—and especially why so supreme an evil as nuclear weapons must be deployed in the tens of thousands. But if the adversary is insufficiently wicked, the incompetence and failed vision of government officials cannot be so easily ignored. Bureaucrats have motives for inventing enemies and exaggerating their misdeeds.