Pale blue dot by Carl Sagan
Narrated by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
Audiobook of Non fiction genre; Stand alone book but reading his earlier books like cosmos will make you prepared on what to expect!
Rating 3/5 overall but 4/5 just to listen to Carl!
Running is over 14 hours or so!
If you increase the speed to 1.2 or 1.3 it can become even 10 hours without any loss of diction or grammar and it actually makes the flow better!
In spite of this the book is long and there is so much of overlap between this book and his other books like cosmos which of course are frequently mentioned in passing and similar sections!
In fact this book took me four months to finish but in spite of that it is a great achievement since I listen to this book only when I go to my work which is a short walk of around 5 minutes! Just five to twenty minutes sometime and in
four months or so you finish this mammoth! That is a lesson in persistence!
Introduction first by his wife which was maybe the only emotional part of the book because when it comes to Carl, it is all science and scientific evidence and nothing else!
Then the best part of the book! To listen to Carl narrate in his own deep powerful voice! Of course it was recorded when audio books were not in fashion and it shows! But you can take this book just to listen to him!
An introduction on how humans or earth or sun or even our galaxy is neither unique nor special!
He talks of earth being such a small part of the cosmos! a pale blue dot! Just a spec of dust in a sunbeam!
This is a part from the narration which I just had to share; ‘Look again at that dot. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam!’
it is mentioned that the old Astronomer Galileo with the first telescope saw the rings of Saturn as ears! It was like that on both sides! Later on of course it was found out to be particles or masses floating in the space held there by the gravity of the huge planet! Then even other bigger planets such as Jupiter or Neptune must have rings in theory! Well apparently they do! They also have rings made of these flying masses of different sizes held by the force or pull of these large planets! Smaller planets like Earth have just enough pull for a single satellite. So many such facts are thrown around for good measure!
Of course the narration by Carl is only a short part of the book and then it changes to Ann who has done a commendable job but sometimes it sounds strained! Also mentally when she speaks in first person she is talking as ‘me’ which means Carl and when you are listening as an audio that gives you a couple of seconds of confusion!
There is a lot of mention of Mars and Mars mission and other missions such as Voyager and others. The debate between cost of sending a probe for outer space exploration or using it for some greater good for humanity is thrown around with justification as a scientist with support for science and technology.
He tells how Mars mission is prohibitively expensive and since it is a matter of the whole earth then multiple countries must collaborate for such missions. Since it was written some time back I am sure Carl would not know about how India sent a probe in a shoestring budget and how! I am sure he would have been the first to applaud this!
In parallels to SETI he talks about META which is a similar concept to find out life in other planet of universe. Of how we need to reach at least close to the speed of light (or some percentage of it) if we have to travel so far and how it is a difficult proposition.
He talks about how radio waves may not be ideal since the alien civilization may be either too backward or too well advanced to use radio waves as means of communication.
He ends with hope to find more civilization if it is out there concluding that for now in the billions of universes, Earth may be the only planet with life!
A good book for people who like cosmos and one you can read just to complete the series; I heard just to listen to Carl and it was worth it!
ramadocblog 