Already at the beginning of the 80s, the astronomer, science popularizer and science fiction author Carl Sagan it revolved around a prediction. The one that saw in the West the rise of great technology, fake news and constructive chatter. And it looks like he was right.
In his book 1995's "The Demon Haunted World. Science Like 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 about to be undermined by humanity's "old super enemies": superstition and pseudoscience.
The West in "cognitive perdition"
The key passage of the whole book, which I will quote you more or less in full, showed two things. First, Sagan's extreme lucidity, who throughout his life proved to be years ahead of his contemporaries. Second, the future of the West from its perspective (especially when it comes to the United States of America) looked like the present we live in today. A world running 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 is a way of thinking. I have a presentiment of an America in the days of my children or grandchildren, where the United States will be a service and information economy. In which nearly all major manufacturing industries will have slipped away to other countries; in which magnificent technological powers will be in the hands of 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 schedules. Or consciously question those in authority. When, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes with our declining critical faculties, we are unable to distinguish between what makes us feel good and what is true, we will slip, almost without realizing it, back into superstition and into darkness.
I wouldn't add anything else. You?
