Pale Blue Dot: 2013 Book #27

4 of 5 stars

After reading this book, it made me wish for trillions of dollars in wealth so I could sink it into a space program.

The strength of this book is how Sagan takes the cold, unforgiving world of space, a place that for all the money we could likely sink into it, will probably not yield (at least in our lifetimes), proof of other life, other habitable worlds, etc. But that’s not the point of the book – the point of the book is possibilities. Of making science fiction real. Because when he talks about how billions of years from now, after our civilization has ended, the Voyager spacecrafts will still be floating out in the Milky Way with a golden record of human life, or when he talks about the chills he gets when he thinks how the SETI program has yielded strong anomolous radio signals, all originating from the direction of stars in the Milky Way, you can’t help but want to get caught up in his passion for the universe and fire up the rockets.

He spends a considerable amount of time talking about our own solar system and exploring the ins and outs of the planets that traverse the night sky but still seem so far out of reach. He also spends considerable time talking about near Earth asteroids, something I wasn’t completely aware of existing before this book. He posits them as potential halfway points between our the Moon (which is old hat by now) and a mission to Mars. Less time is spent on the worlds and stars beyond, but that’s O.K., at the time this book was written less was likely known.

I gave this book 4 stars because some of the information did feel repetitive. While he talks about the planets from all sorts of different angles, at points it feels like he’s rehashing the same data or discovery, albeit in a different and novel way. The other thing I didn’t like is his obvious bias towards the disparity in military vs. science spending. While I completely agree with him, and would love to take even 5% of the defense budget to put towards space exploration, he mentions it at least a half dozen times. It left a small, almost imperceptible bad taste in the bad of my mouth, if only because it feels so out of character for this wonderful book.