Carl #Sagan's eloquent rant against car-dominance (from #PaleBlueDot) - #fuckcars (／u／cahitmetekid)
I was just reading Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and in Chapter 5 he creates this hypothetical scenario where an alien spaceship discovers our planet and starts observing to understand if there's any life or intelligence. I thought you lot would appreciate his brilliant criticism of our car-centric infrastructure:
"When you examine the Earth at about 100-meter resolution, everything changes. The planet is revealed to be covered with straight lines, squares, rectangles, circles sometimes huddling along river banks or nestling on the lower slopes of mountains, sometimes stretching over plains, but rarely in deserts or high mountains, and absolutely never in the oceans. Their regularity, complexity, and distribution would be hard to explain except by life and intelligence, although a deeper understanding of function and purpose might be elusive. Perhaps you would conclude only that the dominant life-forms have a simultaneous passion for territoriality and Euclidean geometry. At this resolution you could not see them, much less know them.
Many of the devegetated smudges are revealed to have an underlying checkerboard geometry. These are the planets cities. Over much of the landscape, and not just in the cities, there is a profusion of straight lines, squares, rectangles, circles. The dark smudges of the cities are revealed to be highly geometrized, with only a few patches of vegetation—themselves with highly regular boundaries—left intact. There are occasional triangles, and in one city there is even a pentagon.
When you take pictures at a meter resolution or better, you find that the crisscrossing straight lines within the cities and the long straight lines that join them with other cities are filled with streamlined, multicolored beings a few meters in length, politely running one behind the other, in long, slow orderly procession. They are very patient. One stream of beings stops so another stream can continue at right angles. Periodically, the favor is returned. At night, they turn on two bright lights in front so they can see where they're going. Some, a privileged few, go into little houses when their workday is done and retire for the night. Most are homeless and sleep in the streets.
At last! You've detected the source of all the technology. the dominant life-forms on the planet. The streets of the cities and the roadways of the countryside are evidently built for their benefit. You might believe that you were really beginning to understand life on Earth. And perhaps you'd be right.
If the resolution improved just a little further, you'd discover tiny parasites that occasionally enter and exit the dominant organisms. They play some deeper role, though, because a stationary dominant organism will often start up again just after it's reinfected by a parasite, and stop again just before the parasite is expelled. This is puzzling. But no one said life on Earth would be easy to understand." (Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, pp. 62-63).
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1i5s121/carl_sagans_eloquent_rant_against_cardominance/
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