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My Thoughts :
Best thing about this book is that it connects with real-world events and scientific phenomena. Carl sagan never misses an opportunity to teach and i found myself dwelling into the character's world while also learning some interesting science about our own world aswell. From spectroscopy, transcendental numbers, and other wonders of the cosmos. I am glad i picked it up because it is honestly one of the best things i have read in a while.

My rating : 9.86/10

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Favourite Quotes :

FOR ALL the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy Soldiers of the United States were fighting in a distant place called Vietnam. Every month, it seemed, more young men were being scooped off the street or the farm and packed off the Vietnam. The more she learned about the origins of the war, and the more she listened to the public pronouncements of national leaders, the more outraged she became. The President and the Congress were lying and killing, she thought to herself, and almost everyone else was mutely assenting. The fact that her stepfather embraced official positions on treaty obligations, dominoes, and naked Communist aggression only strengthened her resolv (22) suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word. (27) His lack of brilliance was in fact his strength. He knew, he was confident, what dummies knew. (34) Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. —JOHN KEATS (ch3) So why had we received no signal? Could Dave possibly be right? No extraterrestrial civilizations anywhere? All those billions of worlds going to waste, lifeless, barren? Intelligent beings growing up only in this obscure corner of an incomprehensibly vast universe? No matter how valiantly she tried, Ellie couldn’t make herself take such a possibility seriously. (61) But she couldn’t get into their minds; she couldn’t imagine what thinking would be like if you were much more capable than a human being. Of course. Nor surprise. What did she expect? It was like trying to visualize a new primary color or a world in which you could recognize several hundred acquaintances individually only by their smells… She could talk about this, but she couldn’t experience it (80) By definition, it has to be mighty hard to understand the behavior of a being much smarter than you are. (80) So why had we received no signal? Could Dave possibly be right? No extraterrestrial civilizations anywhere? All those billions of worlds going to waste, lifeless, barren? Intelligent beings growing up only in this obscure corner of an incomprehensibly vast universe? No matter how valiantly she tried, Ellie couldn’t make herself take such a possibility seriously. So the Vegans didn’t take decades to figure it out. ..(95) The great majority of UFO reports, the DCI continued, were natural objects misapprehended by the observer. Unconventional or experimental aircraft, automobile headlights reflected off overcast, balloons, birds, luminescent insects, even planets and stars seen under unusual atmospheric conditions, had all been reported as UFO’s. A significant number of reports turned out to be hoaxes or real psychiatric delusions. There had been more than a million UFO sightings reported worldwide since the term “flying saucer” had been invented in the late ’40s, and not one of them seemed on good evidence to be connected with an extraterrestrial visitation. (98) Once, during a vigorous discussion on the relative merits of the two political systems, Ellie had boasted that she had been free to march in front of the White House protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War. Vaygay replied that in the same period he had been equally free to march in front of the Kremlin protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War. (110) She was beginning to feel pity for the poor creature, even if it proved to be, say, the larva responsible for the barley blight. “What a wonderful program in this little guy’s head!” he exclaimed. “It works every time—optimum escape software. And he knows not to fall off. I mean the twig is effectively suspended in air. The caterpillar never experiences that in nature, because the twig is always connected to something. Ellie, did you ever wonder what the program would feel like if it was in your head? I mean, would it just seem obvious to you what you had to do when you came to the end of a twig? Would you have the impression you were thinking it through? Would you wonder how you knew to shake your front ten feet in the air but hold on tight with the other eighteen?” She inclined her head slightly and examined him rather than the caterpillar. He seemed to have little difficulty imagining her as an insect. She tried to reply noncommittally, reminding herself that for him this would be a matter of professional interest. (145) “It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.” “Every government that prepares for war paints its adversaries as monsters,” she said. “They don’t want you thinking of the other side as human. If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters.” (146) She took the hand not preoccupied with the caterpillar, and they walked wordlessly past the ranks of names, inscribed in chronological order of death. These were, of course, only American casualties. Except in the hearts of their families and friends, there was no comparable memorial anywhere on the planet for the two million people of Southeast Asia who had also died in the conflict (146) “And take this phrase ‘head over heels in love,’” he continued. “This is a common expression, yes? But it’s exactly backward. Or, rather, upside down. You are ordinarily head over heels. When you are in love you should be heels over head. Am I right? You would know about falling in love. But whoever invented this phrase did not know about love. He imagined you walk around in the usual way, instead of floating upside down in the air, (147) You say there is no love, my love, Unless it lasts for aye. Ah, folly, there are episodes Far better than the play. (148) A little deeper was a fear of falling in love without reservation, of committing herself to someone who might then be snatched from her. Or simply leave her. But if you never really fall in love, you can never really miss it(148) she began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. (149) She imagined a heaven with all those nice moms and dads floating about or flapping over to a nearby cloud. It would have to be a commodious place to accommodate all the tens of billions of people who had lived and died since the emergence of the human species. (150) “So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly—like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who’s more religious would you say—the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?” (151) Do we, holding that gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world? —EURIPIDES Hecuba “You’re uncomfortable with scientific skepticism. But the reason it developed is that the world is complicated. It’s subtle. Everybody’s first idea isn’t necessarily right. Also, people are capable of self-deception. Scientists, too. All sorts of socially abhorrent doctrines have at one time or another been supported by scientists, well-known scientists, famous brand-name scientists. And, of course, politicians. And respected religious leaders. Slavery, for instance, or the Nazi brand of racism. Scientists make mistakes, theologians make mistakes,everybody makes mistakes. It’s part of being human. You say it yourselves: ‘To err is.’ “So the way you avoid the mistakes, or at least reduce the chance that you’ll make one, is to be skeptical. You test the ideas. You check them out by rigorous standards of evidence. I don’t think there is such a thing as a received truth. But when you let the different opinions debate, when any skeptic can perform his or her own experiment to check some contention out, then the truth tends to emerge. That’s the experience of the whole history of science. It isn’t a perfect approach, but it’s the only one that seems to work. (157) “Now, when I look at religion, I see lots of contending opinions. For example, the Christians think the universe is a finite number of years old. From the exhibits out there, it’s clear that some Christians (and Jews, and Muslims) think that the universe is only six thousand years old. The Hindus, on the other hand—and there are lots of Hindus in the world—think that the universe is infinitely old, with an infinite number of subsidiary creations and destructions along the way. Now they can’t both be right. Either the universe is a certain number of years old or it’s infinitely old. Your friends out there”—she gestured out the glass door toward several museum workers ambling past “Darwin’s Default”—“ought to debate Hindus. God seems to have told them something different from what he told you. But you tend to talk only to yourselves.” (157) “The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.” But if there are enough symbols and enough prophecies and enough myth and folklore, eventually a few of them are going to fit some current scientific understanding purely by accident (160) ". I don’t suppose you’d want to argue that the gods talked only to the ancient Greeks. What I’m saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job. And he hardly had to confine himself to writings. Why isn’t there a monster crucifix orbiting the Earth? Why isn’t the surface of the Moon covered with the Ten Commandments? Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?” (161) “Anything you don’t understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges t our intelligence. You simply turn you mind off and say God did it.” (162) Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? —VINCENT VAN GOGH But still worse, she knew, was the intellectual effort dedicated to the arms race. But still worse, she knew, was the intellectual effort dedicated to the arms race. And they were not the dregs of the doctoral programs in physics and mathematics. Some of her colleagues would console themselves with this thought when the awkward problem arose of what to tell a recent doctoral candidate being courted by, say, one of the weapons laboratories. “If he was any good, he’d be offered an assistant professorship at Stanford, at least,” she could recall Drumlin once saying (207) ... No, a certain kind of mind and character was drawn to the military applications of science and mathematics—people who liked big explosions, for example; or those with no taste for personal combat who, to avenge some schoolyard injustice, aspired to military command; or inveterate puzzle solvers who longed to decrypt the most complex messages known. Occasionally the spur was political, tracing back to international disputes, immigration policies, wartime horrors, police brutality, or national propaganda by this nation or that decades earlier. Many of these scientists had real ability, Ellie knew, whatever reservations she might have about their motivations. She tried to imagine that massed talent really dedicated to the well-being of the species and the planet. (208) The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives. (221) “Well, the absence of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only when there’s no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that’s better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and direct mail business will boom, and that’ll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don’t see what the problem is.” (221) "Yes. What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?" (245) The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. —WILLIAM JAMES The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) Popular theology…is a massive inconsistency derived from ignorance… The gods exist because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of men. —CICERO De Natura Deorum, I, 1 “The time necessary to do physics is a luxury,” he told Ellie. “There are many people who could do the same if they had the same opportunity. But if you must search the streets for food, you will not have enough time for physics. It is my obligation to improve conditions for young scientists in my country.” (304) This is the response of the defenders of Sparta to the Commander of the Roman Army: “If you are a god, you will not hurt those who have never injured you. If you are a man, advance—and you will find men equal to yourself.” And women. (310) Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard. (314) The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Hamlet, II, ii, 628 “If the Nazis had taken over the world, our world, and then developed interstellar spaceflight, wouldn’t you have stepped in?” “You’d be surprised how rarely something like that happens. In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It’s their nature. They can’t help it. In such a case, our job would be to leave them alone. To make sure that no one bothers them. To let them work out their destiny.” (347) "if we don’t engineer a consistent causality, it’ll work itself out on its own. Then it’s almost always worse. " (348) Who is all-powerful should fear everything. —PIERRE CORNEILLE Cinna (1640), Act IV, Scene II Look and remember. Look upon this sky; Look deep and deep into the sea-clean air, The unconfined, the terminus of prayer. Speak now and speak into the hallowed dome. What do you hear? What does the sky reply? The heavens are taken; this is not your home. —KARL JAY SHAPIRO Travelogue for Exiles And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone (392) Yon know, as the Earth races around the Sun, the powers of this world—the religious powers, the secular powers—once pretended the Earth wasn’t moving at all. They were in the business of being powerful. Or at least pretending to be powerful And the truth made them feel too small. The truth frightened them; it undermined their power. So they suppressed it. Those people found the truth dangerous. You’re sure you know what believing me entails? (405) "I never liked the idea of Earth as God’s green footstool. It was too reassuring, like a children’s story…like a tranquilizer. But your universe has room enough, and time enough, for the kind of God I believe in" (405) She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love (413) The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for. (414)