PALE BLUE DOT

Are you interested in the results from space missions like Viking or Voyager? If so, you won't find a more readable account of them than this. Sagan was directly involved in Voyager (among other missions), and he was in a position to readily contact the investigators on any other mission of the past 35 years — whether American, Russian, or sponsored by some other country. And, as is well known, he excelled as a communicator. Here he presents a thorough overview of the scientific findings about the other planets gained in those years.

But the book is much more that just a survey of space-age planetary exploration. Part I (chapters 1-5) describes our place in the scheme of things. Sagan begins by recounting the changes in perspective that he calls the Great Demotions. In prehistory, watchers of the sky cannot be blamed for thinking that the sun and the stars revolved around them. By the time of classical Greece, there were those who glimpsed at least part of the truth. Yet, through most of the Christian era, the geocentric viewpoint was sternly enforced by ecclesiastical authorities. It was only in 1992 that the Catholic Church recanted its denunciation of Galileo. By then, it was clear that Earth was far from central in any physical sense. This part ends with a look at Earth provided by the spacecraft Galileo on its second close pass, which shows how hard it still is to see the works of man from that vantage.

Chapters 6 through 10 describe our current understanding of our solar system, beginning with the outer planets so spectacularly unveiled by Voyager 2. The description includes some of the historical basis for these discoveries, and is supplemented by a wealth of images from the spacecraft themselves, along with some artists' conceptions and a few charts.

The remainder of the book examines the nature and worth of human expansion into the solar system (and ultimately beyond). Sagan speculates briefly on the shape this expansion may take, touching on such aspects as terraforming, fusion power and asteroid deflection. He had, it appears, by this time dropped his earlier opposition to any such presence of men and women "out there". This gratifies me. But even if he had not, this book would stand as an excellent introduction to the present state of planetary science for the layman.

I did find one slight error: On page 85, he says, referring to Voyager 1 and 2, that "both spacecraft went on to explore Uranus and Neptune." In fact, only Voyager 2 did this — as he himself points out a few pages later.

To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.
Copyright © 1997-2024 Christopher P. Winter. All rights reserved.
This page was created in 1997. Its contents were last modified on 14 August 2024.