Looking For Life, Part II

FRANK DRAKE and Carl Sagan were good friends. they both had a love affair with science, and said so. Drake, Sagan, and Sagan's wife Ann Druyan collaborated in designing the contents of a golden phonograph recored with a diamond stylus which was later sent into deep space in 1977, and has by now long since left the solar system. Maybe some intelligent entity will find it, figure out the easy instructions for how to build and use a record player, and discern that long ago, on a far distant planet orbiting a very ordinary star, there lived life. Frank Drake, who died last week at age ninety two, was a hero, because he exemplified the highest aspirations of the human species; to seek truth, and to learn. It may be that there exists no other life in the universe, difficult as that is to even imagine, than here on Earth. Or it may be that the universe is replete with life, but that there will never be any knowledge of it by humans. And maybe no other intelligent species will ever know that we even existed. What mattters about people like Frank Drake and Carl Sagan is that they, feet firmly planted on the ground but minds reaching out to the universe, acknowledge reality, live within it, and try to honestly contribute to the advance of human knowledge. They, Drake and Sgan and others like them, understood their limitations, the limitations of human discovery and knowledge, and never tried to pad their resumes with the sort of idiotic, outlandish speculative claims which are in such great vogue today. Beware anyone who claims to have established contact with beings from other worlds; they are charlatans. Pursuing new knowledge by using the scientfic method is among the most sublime and fulfilling of all endeavors. Pitiable are those who waste their time and other's time trying to persuade people that they have special knowledge of extraterrestrial life, or other "dimensions", knowledge which only they seem to have, none of which can be proven, for which there is no evidence. People who find science, good old fashoned mainstream empircal science inadequate are intellectually and emotionaly bereft, and are seeking to enhance thier low self esteem by passing themselves off as possessing special knowledge, as having information, and a vision of reality which others cannot share without instruction from the possessor. These fraudulant folks are a drain on humanity, a burden to future progress. They distract from what is important, in service to their need for attention and personal acclaim. They are the disease; people like Frank Drake and Carl Sagan are the cure. Or, as Bertrand Russell said, religion is the disease, Voltaire is the cure. May we never exhaust our supply of intellectual medicine.