Already at the beginning of the 80s, the astronomer, science communicator and science fiction author Carl Sagan it revolved around a prediction. The one that saw the rise of big technology, fake news and pointless chatter in the West. And it seems he was right.
In his book of 1995 “The world infested by demons. Science as a candle in the dark” Sagan explained how the scientific method had helped illuminate many of the darkest corners of the universe. However, he believed that the search for peace and truth was being undermined by humanity's "old super enemies": superstition and pseudoscience.
The West in “cognitive perdition”
The key passage in the entire book, which I will quote to you more or less in full, showed two things. First, the extreme lucidity of Sagan, who throughout his life proved to be years ahead of his contemporaries. Second, the future of the West from his perspective (especially when talking about the United States of America) looked like the present we live in today. A world racing on a desolate slope, far from rationality.
Today, I insist, because Sagan's is more than a prediction looks like a portrait.
Carl Sagan's prediction
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it's a way of thinking. I have a vision of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time, where the United States will be a service and information economy. In which almost all major manufacturing industries will have slipped away to other countries; in which magnificent technological powers will be in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest will even be able to grasp the problems.
When we live in a society where people have lost the ability to set their own agendas. Or consciously question those in authority. When, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes with our critical faculties in decline, we are unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true, we will slip, almost without realizing it, back into superstition and darkness.
I wouldn't add anything else. You?
