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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
interested to see what the real circumstances were. With Mariner
9 and with Viking, we were able to map the planet pole-to-pole,
detecting features hundreds of times smaller than the best that
could be seen from Earth. I found, not altogether to my surprise,
not a trace of canals. There were a few more or less linear features
that had been made out through the telescope - for example, a
5,000-kilometre-long rift valley that would have been hard to
miss. But the hundreds of 'classical' canals carrying water from the
polar caps through the arid deserts to the parched equatorial cities
simply did not exist. They were an illusion, some malfunction of
the human hand-eye-brain combination at the limit of resolution
when we peer through an unsteady and turbulent atmosphere.
Even a succession of professional scientists - including famous
astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed
and now justly celebrated - can make serious, even profound
errors in pattern recognition. Especially where the implications of
what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not
exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism. The Martian
canal myth constitutes an important cautionary tale.
For the canals, spacecraft missions provided the means of
correcting our misapprehensions. But it is also true that some of
the most haunting claims of unexpected patterns emerge from
spacecraft exploration. In the early 1960s, I urged that we be
attentive to the possibility of finding the artefacts of ancient
civilizations, either those indigenous to a given world, or those
constructed by visitors from elsewhere. I didn't imagine that this
would be easy or probable, and I certainly did not suggest that, on
so important a matter, anything short of iron-clad evidence would
be worth considering.
Beginning with John Glenn's evocative report of 'fireflies' surrounding
his space capsule, every time an astronaut reported seeing
something not immediately understood, there were those who
deduced 'aliens'. Prosaic explanations - specks of paint flecking off
the ship in the space environment, say - were dismissed with
contempt. The lure of the marvellous blunts our critical faculties. (As
if a man become a moon is not marvel enough.)
Around the time of the Apollo lunar landings, many nonexperts
- owners of small telescopes, flying saucer zealots, writers
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