John Carter and Carl Sagan

John Carter and Carl Sagan

We can remember as children reading with breathless fascination the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. We journeyed with John Carter, gentelman adventurer from Virginia, to “Barsoom”, as Mars was known to its inhabitants. We followed herds of eight-legged beasts of burden, the thoats. We won the hand of the lovely Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium. We befriended a four-meter-high green fighting man named Tars Tarkas. We wandered within the spired cities and domed pumping stations of Barsoom, and along the verdant banks of Nylosirtis and Nepenthes canals.

Might it really be possible – in fact and not in fancy – to venture with John Carter to the kingdom of Helium on the planet Mars? Could we venture out on a summer evening, our way illuminated by the two hurting moons of Barsoom, for a journey of high scientific adventure?

Even if all Lowell’s conclusions about Mars, including the existence of the fabled canals, turned out to be bankrupt, his depiction of the planet had at least this virtue: it aroused generations of eight-year-olds, myself among them, to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility, to wonder if we ourselves might one day voyage to Mars.

John Carter got there by standing in an open field, spreading his hands and wishing. Carl Sagan spent many an hour in his boyhood, arms resolutely outstretched in an empty field, imploring what he believed to be Mars to transport him there. It never worked. There had to be some other way.

Great secrets are wrested from Nature through a million years of patient observation and courageous thinking by our ancestors. Image: Computer Graphics CGI Computer Generated Imagery © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Anyway, Sagan learned another astonishing fact. The Earth, which includes Brooklyn, is a planet, and it goes around the Sun. There are other planets. They go also around the Sun; some are closer to it and some are father away. But the planets do not shine by their own light, as the Sun does. They merely reflect light from the Sun. If you were a great distance away, you would not see the Earth and the other planets at all;; they would be only faint luminous points, los in the glare of the Sun. It stand to reason that the other stars must have planets too, ones we have not yet detected, and some of those other planets should have life (why not?), a kind of life probably different from life as we know it, life in Brooklyn. So, Car Sagan decided, he would be an astronomer, learn about the stars and planets, and, if he could, go and visit them. It was his immense good fortune to have parents and some teachers who encouraged this odd ambition and to live in this time, the first moment in human history when we are, in fact, visiting other worlds and engaging in a deep reconnaissance of the Cosmos. If Sagan had been born in a much earlier age, no matter how great his dedication, he would not have understood what the stars and planets are. He would not have known that there were other suns and other worlds.