Around 30 years ago , Dr Carl Sagan made an eerily prophetic prediction about the future of the US , appearing to foretell the rise of big technical school , misinformation , and superstition .
Sagan is best known as a sermoniser of scientific discipline , pass on complex ideas withpassion and poetrylike no other , but the former astrophysicist was also a dab hand at astute insights into world .
In his 1995 bookThe Demon - Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark , Sagan explain how the scientific method helped to illuminate many of the existence ’s gloomiest corners . However , he argued that the pursuit of public security and trueness was being countermine by humankind ’s old friends : superstitious notion and pseudoscience .
Within a passage of the textbook that frequently go viral , Sagan set out his pessimistic imagination of where the US will go if it lose its wonder for understanding , rationality , and open - tending thinking .
It read : “ I have a foreboding of an America in my small fry ’s or grandchildren ’s clock time — when the United States is a service and data economy ; when almost all the key manufacturing manufacture have slip away to other country ; when awing technological powers are in the hands of a very few , and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues ; when the hoi polloi have lost the ability to set their own docket or knowledgeably wonder those in authority ; when , clutch our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscope , our critical faculties in declination , ineffective to distinguish between what feels good and what ’s true , we slide , almost without noticing , back into superstitious notion and darkness . ”
“ And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantial content in the tremendously influential media , the 30 - mo speech sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less , lowest - vulgar - denominator computer programing , credulous presentment on pseudoscience and superstition , but especially a form of festivity of ignorance . ”
For more insights from this impudent someone , you might want tocheck out his “ clandestine ” essayabout the benefit of marijuana use .
Anearlier version of this articlewas first print in August 2022 .
