Carl Sagan Lied Like a Rug

By Douglas Sczygelski

The author shows that Carl Sagan's books are full of lies. Sagan falsely claimed that the Bible says the Earth is flat. He falsely claimed that no Catholic saint ever opposed executing heretics. (I know at least two - St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Martin of Tours - specifically did.) He falsely claimed that in the Book of Genesis, God forbids Adam and Eve to have sexual intercourse with each other. He falsely claimed that Ronald Reagan falsely claimed to have helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp. In an astonishing fit of paranoia, he once claimed that America's school board members and school superintendents have intentionally created a lousy public education system because they want the American people to be stupid so they will never think of questioning authority. Perhaps his biggest lie was his claim that we should generously fund SETI, because aliens from outer space may send us a message that will tell us how to avoid nuclear war. The truth is that there is no way a message from aliens about political or diplomatic matters could possibly be deciphered. Neither Sagan nor anyone else has ever suggested a method for deciphering such a message.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Douglas Sczygelski
• Release date: Aug 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463083888

Douglas Sczygelski

Douglas Sczygelski was born and raised in Merrill, Wisconsin, a nice town with a low crime rate. He has a master's degree in journalism from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

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CARL SAGAN

LIED LIKE A RUG

Text Copyright 2018 Douglas Sczygelski

All Rights Reserved

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All the facts in this e-book can be found in the chapter about Carl Sagan in the e-book Darwin Wanted to Exterminate the Blacks, and Other Facts about Famous Atheists, by the same author.

At the time of his death, Carl Sagan was surely the most famous scientist in the United States. He appeared as a guest on Johnny Carson’s TV show twenty-six times in thirteen years.(See page 264 of Keay Davidson's book, Carl Sagan: A Life.) At the end of 1996, when Newsweek printed a 2-page list of the famous people who had died during the year, accompanied by large photographs of only six of those people, one of the photographs was of Sagan. (See pages 134-135 of the December 30, 1996 & January 6, 1997 issue.) His obituary in the Christian Science Monitor was titled Carl Sagan: Science Poet, Science Prophet.(See page 15 of the December 24, 1996 issue.) His obituary in the Washington Post was titled, Carl Sagan, Who Reached for the Stars and Touched Millions, Dies at 62. (See the December 21, 1996 issue.) His book Cosmos was on the Publishers Weekly hardcover nonfiction bestseller list for seventy weeks and his novel Contact was on the Publishers Weekly paperback fiction bestseller list for ten weeks. (See page 28 of the March 14, 1982 issue of Publishers Weekly, and page 90 of the September 22, 1997 issue of Publishers Weekly.) Other than Vladimir Nabokov, I can think of no American scientist in the twentieth century who wrote a bestselling novel. When the editors of Discover magazine listed the twenty-five best science books ever written, Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective was on the list, right alongside works by Einstein, Newton, Galileo and Darwin. (See the December 2006 issue of Discover, pages 58-63.)

Of course, fame is not evidence of integrity. The man lied constantly.

SECTION 1: SAGAN LIED ABOUT SETI

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the idea that radioastronomers with powerful, expensive equipment might be able to pick up radio signals from alien planets, and that furthermore, alien civilizations might even be deliberately sending messages to Earth. Listening costs money, of course, so advocates of SETI, including Sagan, turned to the federal government for funding. To secure funding, they had to argue that SETI was important. This was difficult, because the simple fact is that SETI is hardly more important than stamp collecting.

In that book that the editors of Discover magazine admired so much, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, published in 1973, Sagan wrote about SETI on pages 217 through 220. He said aliens may send us a message that will give humans scientific, logical, cultural and ethical knowledge, and maybe the initial message received will contain instructions for avoiding our own self-destruction, a possibly common fate of societies shortly after they reach the technical phase.

In other words, he thought the aliens could give us political advice on how to avoid nuclear war and other man-made disasters. There are two problems with this claim.

First, there are already thousands of political science professors and political journalists in the United States, Canada, western Europe, and so on, who would love to go down in history as the person who made nuclear war significantly less likely. If they have not thought of any political advice that could solve the problem, why should we think that aliens who have never met us and know nothing about us will be able to think of something that the professors and journalists never thought of? War is a psychological problem, and it seems likely that aliens will be psychologically quite different from us. What if the aliens are just not naturally aggressive? We should not assume that what works for them would work for us.

Second, Sagan never explained how such a message could be read. We will not know the aliens’ language, and they will not know ours, so how could they possibly communicate complicated political ideas to us? Or even simple ones? If you gave a textbook on American constitutional law, written in English, to a group of highly intelligent Koreans who don't know how to read English or any other European language, does anyone seriously believe that the group would be able to figure out what the textbook was saying? Even in a thousand years, they would never figure it out.

Look at it this way. If we wanted to explain to aliens that the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but only Congress can declare war, and the president’s nominees for the joint chiefs of staff can take office only after confirmation by the Senate, and federal judges serve until death, retirement or impeachment, and only the federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce, and we have freedom of speech, but there is no right to shout through a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood in the middle of the night, and there is no right to yell Fire! in a crowded theatre when there is no fire, and child pornography is illegal, and people can be sued for libel but not jailed for it, how would we do that? I do not see how that could be done, and Sagan, in all the books he ever wrote, never gave an explanation of how it could be done, which is amazing when you consider how often he wrote about SETI. Even if the explanation would take too long, even if the explanation is in a 900-page book, why did Sagan not tell his readers the title and author of that book so they could get a copy and read it if they wished? The only explanation that makes any sense is that Sagan had no idea of how to do it, but could not bear to admit that. Instead he told his readers a crazy lie about how a message from aliens might help us avoid nuclear war.

Pages 40-45 of the January 2011 issue of Scientific American magazine contain a discussion of the problems of SETI. Psychologist Douglas Vakoch works at the SETI Institute, and he doubts that discovering an alien signal will change human society or culture much. (So much for Sagan's idea that aliens can teach us how to abolish war.) Other experts doubt that we will ever understand a message from aliens. An anthropologist named Kathryn Denning says communication between people who don't speak the same language and who can't talk face to face is tough for her to imagine. Nobody in the article thinks discovering a signal would drastically change human culture, and nobody is sanguine about deciphering the message.

Despite these obvious problems, Sagan kept giving people that same old sales pitch. He once met with Senator William Proxmire and told him, apparently with a straight face, that SETI was important because if we found evidence of extraterrestrial life, that would prove that the human race is not destined to destroy itself with high-tech weapons. (This meeting is mentioned on page 348 of Keay Davidson's biography of Sagan and page 273 of William Poundstone's biography of Sagan.) Is it not obvious that war is a psychological problem, and aliens would surely have different brain chemistry and psychology from us, and therefore the development of their societies would tell us no more about human civilization than a termite colony does? Is it also not obvious that a message from aliens would only prove that the aliens had not destroyed themselves yet, but still might? Yet, after this meeting, Proxmire dropped his opposition to having the government fund SETI. Did Sagan change Proxmire’s mind with this ridiculous argument? Sagan’s biographer Keay Davidson thinks so. But I wonder if there is a more prosaic explanation. By the time of the meeting with Proxmire, Sagan was a very rich man. What if he simply gave Proxmire a bribe or offered his party a large campaign contribution? Sagan might have thought it was a good investment to give a politician fifty thousand dollars in order to get millions of dollars for SETI.

Still, Sagan felt the need to elicit support from the general public. On page 276 of his book Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, he held out the possibility that an alien message might give us solutions, still undiscovered on Earth, to problems of food shortages, population growth, energy supplies, dwindling resources, pollution and war. One wonders why he did not also suggest that the alien message might tell us how to cure athlete's foot and bad breath.

I think one could say, with just as much logic, that maybe there is a cave in the Himalayas that contains a gold box that contains an ancient book that has the answers to all our problems, so let us spend millions of dollars to send explorers to search every cave in the Himalayas.

A few years later, in his book Cosmos, on pages 242-245, Sagan talks about how Jean Champollion was able to figure out how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics because he had the Rosetta stone, which showed a lengthy passage in hieroglyphics and that same passage in a language that Champollion knew how to read. Sagan then asks, If we should receive a radio message from an extraterrestrial civilization, how could it possibly be understood? He proceeds to ignore that question for several pages, but then on page 259, he suddenly announces that an alien message will give us insights on alien science and technology, art, music, politics, ethics, philosophy, religion, and most of all, a profound deprovincialization of the human condition.

How would this be done? On page 260, Sagan talks vaguely about aliens transmitting a primer, an introduction to the language of interstellar discourse. Obviously, that doesn't really tell us anything. Yet on page 259, he says, I believe that understanding the interstellar message will be the easiest part of the problem.

In short, Sagan waves his arms in the air, announces that the problem is easy to solve, and then runs away without solving it.

Years later, Sagan wrote a novel called Contact, in which humans receive a broadcast from aliens who are living in a solar system twenty-six light-years from Earth. The message, among other things, contains a series of dots and dashes that can be arranged into a series of pictures, the same way a black-and-white photo is made up of tiny black and white dots. On pages 232-235, Sagan says the pictures are used as blueprints to enable humans to build a strange machine, but he does not go into details and does not explain how that could be done.

All Sagan had to do was explain how the alien message could tell people how to build the machine. How, for example, could one part of the message be translated into Add ten kilograms of titanium dioxide to the mixture and heat it to 950 degrees Celsius for six hours while stirring vigorously? But Sagan never even tries to explain that. One must conclude that he could think of no way to do it.

It is interesting to note that in Contact the alien message contains nothing but instructions for building a machine. The aliens make no attempt to explain their political system or philosophy. Again, one is left with the feeling that Sagan could think of no way that an alien message could tell us such things. His own novel provides strong evidence that his claim is false.

In 1985, Sagan delivered a series of lectures in Great Britain, and after his death these lectures were combined into a book called The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. On pages 120-121, he says aliens could send us pictures, like television, and they could send us numbers by transmitting beep for one, and beep beep for two, and so on, and then if they send us a bunch of messages along the lines of beep ooma beep snerp beep beep, and that tells us that ooma means plus and snerp means equals, and then they send us a bunch of messages along the lines of beep ooma beep snerp beep beep beep followed by some symbol, and that symbol must mean false. So, Sagan says, the words true and false can be transmitted. Sagan says this sort of stuff, together with pictures, could send a very rich message.

Obviously, what Sagan was describing would not be a very rich message. What would be so great about hearing a bunch of arithmetic problems? Once again, Sagan was lying. But it is interesting to note that in these lectures, he never claims the aliens could tell us how to prevent nuclear war or fight pollution or anything of that nature. One suspects that is because these lectures were delivered before an audience of educated people, and Sagan was afraid they might ask tough, skeptical questions if he made extravagant claims.

Sagan also mentions SETI on pages 352-353 of his book Pale Blue Dot, published in 1994, just two years before his death. There he admits that some people think the alien message would be indecipherable. He responds to that objection by babbling irrelevant nonsense and then changing the subject. He did not have enough integrity to admit that his idea of getting political advice from aliens was an empty promise.

In an interview in December 1994, Sagan went back to his old tricks. He failed to even mention the possibility that the message would be indecipherable. Instead he insisted that the aliens’ message would give us information about science, religion, and social organization, but of course, he offered no explanation of how the message could be deciphered. (See page 97 of the book Conversations with Carl Sagan, edited by Tom Head.)

As near as I can tell, Sagan’s last words on the subject came on page 396 of his last book, The Demon-Haunted World. There, he vaguely states that if we decipher the alien message, the practical benefits might be unprecedented. He also says that perhaps the message will be indecipherable, but even so, the message would transform our view of the Universe and ourselves. In what ways? He fails to say. Why did he think that? He presents no logical reason. As Sagan surely knew, a famous astronomer named Percival Lowell, in the late 1800s, claimed that he could see canals on Mars. Many other astronomers agreed with him, so the idea spread that there was a canal-building civilization on Mars. But this does not seem to have affected anybody's view of the Universe and ourselves. (See page 282 of Seth Shostak's book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.)

As near as I can tell, just about everybody in Europe and North America already believes that the universe is so big that surely intelligent life must exist on at least a few other planets, so receiving the message will not tell us anything we do not already know. Naturally, the news media would report that the message has been received, and if the aliens send us some pictures, we will all look at the picture, but I do not see why anyone would expect this knowledge to cause any significant change in human society. People just would read the article, then turn the page and read about Kim Kardashian, or whomever. Nothing significant would change.

And, of course, the people who do not want to believe in intelligent life on other planets will just say the message is a hoax.

I checked other books on SETI to see what they had to say about reading alien messages.

Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a book Sagan himself edited. It consists of transcripts from an international conference on SETI in 1971. In the entire book,