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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
however, provide a precedent in popular culture for the
extraterrestrial/human hybrids that later became so central a
component of the alien abduction story. There must be dozens of
alien species on the various 'Star Trek' TV series and movies.
Almost all we spend any time with are minor variants of humans.
This is driven by economic necessity, costing only an actor and a
latex mask, but it flies in the face of the stochastic nature of the
evolutionary process. If there are aliens, almost all of them I think
will look devastatingly less human than Klingons and Romulans
(and be at widely different levels of technology). 'Star Trek'
doesn't come to grips with evolution.
In many TV programmes and films, even the casual science -
the throwaway lines that are not essential to a plot already
innocent of science - is done incompetently. It costs very little to
hire a graduate student to read the script for scientific accuracy.
But, so far as I can tell, this is almost never done. As a result we
have such howlers as 'parsec' mentioned as a unit of speed instead
of distance in the - in many other ways exemplary - film Star
Wars. If such things were done with a modicum of care, they
might even improve the plot; certainly, they might help convey a
little science to a mass audience.
There's a great deal of pseudoscience for the gullible on TV,
a fair amount of medicine and technology, but hardly any
science, especially on the big commercial networks, whose
executives tend to think that science programming means
ratings declines and lost profits, and nothing else matters.
There are network employees with the title 'Science Correspondent',
and an occasional news feature said to be devoted to
science. But we almost never hear any science from them, just
medicine and technology. In all the networks, I doubt if there's
a single employee whose job it is to read each week's issue of
Nature or Science to see if anything newsworthy has been
discovered. When the Nobel Prizes in science are announced
each fall, there's a superb news 'hook' for science: a chance to
explain what the prizes were given for. But, almost always, all
we hear is something like '. . . may one day lead to a cure for
cancer. Today in Belgrade . . .'
How much science is there on the radio or television talk shows,
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