Carl Sagan’s Message to Mars Explorers, with a Gentle Warning

“Whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.”

Several months before his death in 1996, Carl Sagan — who twenty years prior had co-composed the Arecibo message as part of the Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) project and sent the Golden Record into space — sat down in his home at 900 Stewart Avenue in Ithaca, New York, and recorded a moving message to the future explorers, conquerors, and settlers of Mars. As NASA’s Curiosity Rover makes history this week, Sagan’s words echo with even more poignancy and timeliness.

Maybe we’re on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there — the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Maybe we’re on Mars because we have to be, because there’s a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process — we come, after all, from hunter-gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we’ve been wanderers. And the next place to wander to is Mars. But whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.

But some sixteen years prior, in Chapter V of his legendary Cosmos, titled “Blues for a Red Planet,” Sagan had voiced a gentle lament reminding us to keep our solipsistic anthropocentrism in check:

The surface area of Mars is exactly as large as the land area of the Earth. A thorough reconnaissance will clearly occupy us for centuries. But there will be a time when Mars is all explored; a time after robot aircraft have mapped it from aloft, a time after rovers have combed the surface, a time after samples have been returned safely to Earth, a time after human beings have walked the sands of Mars. What then? What shall we do with Mars?

There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars.

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A Three-Movement Choral Suite Based on Carl Sagan

“Something incredible is waiting to be known.”

What could be better than the solar system set to music in a near-perpetual homage to Bach? Little, but a three-movement choral suite inspired by Carl Sagan might be it — a magnificent mashup of Sagan’s timeless words set to harmonizing voices and an awe-inspiring montage of space exploration footage. Here’s to cosmic goosebumps, courtesy of Canadian composer and teacher Kenley Kristofferson.

If we do not destroy ourselves, then we will someday venture to the stars.

Download the mp3 here. See more of ‘s Sagan tributes, though not choral, here. Then revisit the excellent Sagan Series and dip into Sagan’s own mind.

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Carl Sagan’s Reading List

Reverse-engineering one of the greatest minds of all time by his information diet.

“Success,” concluded this 1942 anatomy of inspiration, “depends on sufficient knowledge of the special subject, and a variety of extraneous knowledge to produce new and original combinations of ideas.” Few are the heroes of modern history more “successful” and inspired than the great Carl Sagan, and his 1954 reading list, part of his papers recently acquired by the Library of Congress, speaks to precisely this blend of wide-angle, cross-disciplinary curiosity and focused, in-field expertise — and is balanced with a healthy approach to reading and “non-reading”, with some books read “in whole” and others “in part.” (Sagan, as we know, was an avid advocate of books.)

Besides books immediately relevant to Sagan’s work as a scientist and educator in cosmology and astrophysics, he took great care to also touch on history, philosophy, religion, the arts, social science, and psychology. A small but revealing sample, fodder for your own cognitive bookshelf:

• Extraordinary Popular Delusions (public library; public domain) by Charles Mackay
• The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies (public library) by Herbert Joseph Muller
• The Immoralist (public library) by André Gide
• Education for Freedom (public library) by Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chapter One: “The Autobiography of an Uneducated Man”)
• Young Archimedes and Other Stories (public library) by Aldous Huxley
• Timaeus (public library; public domain) by Plato
• Who Speaks for Man? (public library) by Norman Cousins
• The Republic (public library; public domain) by Plato
• The History of Western Philosophy (public library) by W. T. Jones
• But We Were Born Free (public library) by Elmer Holmes Davis

Wash down with Alan Turing’s reading list.

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