Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

House on Fire
little we rely on our sense of touch. In the dark and the quiet,
you're alone with your thoughts. Somehow the experience is
exhilarating . . .
• You examine a detailed reconstruction of a procession of
priests climbing up one of the great ziggurats of Sumer, or a
gorgeously painted tomb in the Valley of the Kings in ancient
Egypt, or a house in ancient Rome, or a full-scale turn-of-thecentury
street in small town America. You think of all those
civilizations, so different from yours, how if you'd been born
into them you would have thought them completely natural,
how you'd consider our society - if you had somehow been told
of it - as weird . . .
• You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips
out on to the microscope stage. You look at the projected
image. The drop is full of life, strange beings swimming,
crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph
and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more
exotic than in any science-fiction movie . . .
• Seated in the theatre, you find yourself inside the head of an
eleven-year-old boy. You look out through his eyes. You
encounter his typical daily crises: bullies, authoritarian adults,
crushes on girls. You hear the voice inside his head. You
witness his neurological and hormonal responses to his social
environment. And you get to wonder how you work on the
inside . . .
• Following the simple instructions, you type in the commands.
What will the Earth look like if we continue to burn coal, oil
and gas, and double the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere? How much hotter will it be? How much polar ice
will melt? How much higher will the oceans be? Why are we
pouring so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? What if
we put five times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
Also, how could anybody know what the future climate will be
like? It gets you thinking . . .
In my childhood, I was taken to the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City. I was transfixed by the dioramas -
lifelike representations of animals and their habitats all over the
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