Flying Saucers Again: Do You Believe in Them?

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

However this may be, there seem to be increasing numbers of scientists prepared to populate the universe—very speculatively and cautiously—with superior intelligences, hopefully benevolent, possibly menacing, but differing mainly from their Sumerian predecessors in being subject to 20th century laws of physics and chemistry.

I would have liked to have seen this book completed with what is a still more intriguing line of thought. Physics and chemistry, and our view of the universe, have emerged as the result of a mode of thinking and a direction of interests which are historically very new. Is there any reason to suppose they are final?

Suppose that human consciousness is engaged in a slow evolution. We may as Sagan and Shklovskii themselves recognize come to look back on their view of the universe as a quaint historical curiosity. Interest and awareness may have moved on to quite different kinds of experience.

There is a very real sense in which the vast and awe-inspiring universe in which we live is the product of our own explicitly 20th century minds. We have never seen it; it is a great feat of imagination which is then incorporated into the apparatus and experiments which confirm—with the help of a long chain of inference—our imaginings. But the future could bring new imaginations. These would direct our attention to new phenomena, suggest quite different experiments, and could lead to quite new perspectives.